Michael McFaul is the Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies in Political Science, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, all at Stanford University. He is the author of From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia and Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder.
The Democracy Paradox is made in partnership with the Kellogg Institute of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame.
We don’t need to export ideas about freedom and democracy because those ideas are already really popular around the world.
Michael McFaul
Key Highlights
- Introduction – 0:20
- The Cocktail of Power and Dictatorship – 3:33
- Shades of Gray – 14:50
- Rupture – 28:06
- Democracy at Home – 39:03
Introduction
Today’s guest is Michael McFaul. He was a widely respected political scientist at Stanford University when he became an advisor for Barak Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. He went onto become a foreign policy advisor in the Obama Administration including a role as the ambassador to Russia around the time Putin was returning to the Presidency. He wrote about his tumultuous experience in his book From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia.
Since then, Michael McFaul has become one of the most outstanding critics of Putin and an influential voice in conversations about relations between the United States and Russia. What makes his analysis different is he was a noted scholar of democracy before he became involved in international relations, so he has an intimate understanding of theory and practice.
Last year he published a new book Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder. It’s an expansive look at foreign policy with an emphasis on the complicated dynamic between the United States, China, and Russia. It’s a long book that covers many issues in depth, but what sets it apart from many other works on foreign affairs is his emphasis on the importance of regime type in international politics. In other words, he believes there is a natural conflict between powerful democracies and powerful autocracies.
I find this idea fascinating because it’s not just theoretical. It has real implications. Our conversation explores whether democracies are natural allies with one another, whether different types of autocracies interact differently, and if the current era makes differences between regimes more salient than during the Cold War.
One of the most challenging questions I pose to Michael McFaul is one I usually avoid. What is democracy? If democracies don’t go to war with each other and are natural allies, a definition of democracy has practical implications. It can influence what countries we support or even defend against military aggression. But whenever we define democracy, we get lost in what we want democracy to mean.
So my challenge to you is to develop a practical definition for democracy. What countries does your definition include and which does it leave out? Does your definition change if it carries foreign policy implications? If you listen to Spotify, you can leave your thoughts as a comment on the episode. You can also send me your ideas to jkempf@democracyparadox.com. There is a link to the complete transcript in the show notes.
The Democracy Paradox is made in partnership with the Kellogg Institute of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. But for now… here is my conversation with Michael McFaul…
Podcast Transcript
jmk: Michael McFaul, welcome to the Democracy Paradox.
Michael McFaul: Glad to be here.
jmk: Well, Michael, I was real excited to be able to read your new book. Came out last year, Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder. I’d like to start out by asking something that’s central to the title and one of the big key themes to the book.
When I think about the Cold War, I mean, it was very much between different economic systems. I mean, that was the real division. I guess I wonder from the title and from some of the discussions you’ve had about the book, is the current geopolitical divide then currently between different political systems rather than economic ones?
Michael McFaul: Yeah, that’s a great, hard question. So in my view, the Cold War was both economic systems and political systems, although there were varieties of dictatorships. Some were communist, some were not, and that we had relationships with some autocracies. We weren’t just dealing with democracies, so it’s a complicated picture.
Our current era is also complicated in that there is autocrats and democrats, and we still have friendly relations with some autocracies as well as democracies, and most certainly in the Trump era, we’re moving even more towards that. I’m not sure in the divide between autocrats and democrats which side he personally is on anymore.
But on the economic story, we’re not separated into communist systems and market systems. The Chinese economy is way more intertwined in our economy here in the United States and then intertwined throughout the world, and that creates a different set of challenges than during the Cold War, some that are harder to deal with and some that are easier to deal with.
My book’s a lot about complexity, and we got to understand the complexity, not just to simplify things as this is Cold War 2.0 or it has nothing to do with the Cold War. But on the economic piece, that’s what’s challenging, therefore it demands a different set of policies, in my view, than we had during the Cold War.
jmk: So even though we’re still aligned with some autocracies today, particularly in places like the Middle East, but really in many places around the world, we have close relationships with autocracies, even if they’re not formal allies. It feels like during the Cold War, we had even more relationships with autocracies and efforts to be able to cultivate autocracies.
But the way that the book reads, it feels like regime type really does matter quite a bit in terms of what our natural alliances would be. I mean, do you feel that during the Cold War that regime type did matter, or did the economic dimension and really even just geopolitical interests as a whole just subsume that and make it so that the political dimension didn’t matter as much?
Michael McFaul: A couple of things. First of all, it’s the cocktail of power and dictatorship that creates threats to us. Yes, we had relationships with some autocracies, I’m going to get to that in a minute, during the Cold War. I personally think most of those were a mistake. But it’s when there’s powerful autocracies, that’s when you have an adversarial relationship with the United States.
You know, you think of the Cold War, that’s the Soviet Union. You think of, you know, World War II, that’s Nazi Germany and Japan. If the Nazis had the power of, I don’t know, Kyrgyzstan today, would we have had such an adversarial relationship with them? Maybe not. And there are lots of autocratic regimes around the world today because they have no power.
I don’t even know what our relationship is with them. It’s the combination of power and regime type, not just regime type. But secondly, I do think there were more opportunities in the Cold War for autocrats to take advantage of the Cold War struggle and just to declare themselves to be anti-communist, and then we took them in.
We said, “Okay, if you’re anti-communist, then you’re on our team, and we’re going to look the other way for the atrocities that you’re committing.” I’m thinking of Congo and Zaire. I’m thinking of apartheid South Africa. They were our ally because they were anti-communist. And you see some of that today without question.
Vietnam is a close country to the United States, even though they have pretty close regime type in Vietnam as they do in China today. But because of the economic things that you were talking about and this interdependence with autocracies that are all over the world, I think it’s more relaxed. I think there’s more permissive conditions for these more cooperative relationships.
And most certainly under President Trump. I mean, you know, he just treated like a rock star the head of the most powerful communist in the world. Think about that. The other thing I would say, however, going back to the Cold War, but I think our most enduring allies were democracies. The problem with our autocratic allies is two things.
One, they’re more prone to overthrow and revolution. Revolutions tend not to happen in democracies. They do happen in autocracies. So Shah of Iran, he was a great ally for the United States in the Cold War for thirty-six years, but man, he wasn’t a very good ally in nineteen seventy-nine. That doesn’t happen in France or Britain or Australia or Japan.
And autocrats can also change their mind quickly, right? They can pivot. One day they’re with us, and one day they’re against us because they’re not beholden to their electorate, in terms of what they do, so that makes them, I think, more erratic. I think, this is where I’m hesitating, I think that’s still true today.
Most certainly I hope it will be true today. That is to say that our democratic allies are much more enduring for the long term than our autocratic partners, and I changed the word there. I hope you noticed. I did that on purpose. But President Trump has done so much damage to some of those bilateral relationships with democracies, thinking of Denmark first and foremost, I’m thinking of Canada, that I worry that my hope will not be supported by data in the long run.
I’m going to keep fighting for it ’cause I think it’s in long-term national interest of the United States, but I think there’s a bigger question mark about this assumption, are democracies more enduring allies for the United States than not because of this current moment that we’re in under President Trump.
jmk: Does the type of autocracy matter, particularly if they’re going to work together? For instance, there’s a lot of discussion about the relationship between China and Russia and how it can feel like an odd fit. I mean, Russia very much comes across like their goal is to disrupt the world order and undermine it, whereas China wants not to destroy it because they get too many advantages out of it.
They want to be able to turn it to their own advantages and their own ends. Those two interests can work together for a little while, but it feels like there’s a point where they might diverge, so does the type of autocratic country really matter, the type of regime type within autocracies matter? Or is it just the fact that it’s an autocracy that they’re going to find a natural affinity with each other?
Michael McFaul: Another great question, and I wrestle a lot with this in my book, as you know. So if I were standing up in front of my classroom, I would now draw a two-by-two matrix just for everybody listening, and I would break it down in two different respects. One is about regime type, and then one would be about leaders.
So on regime type, there are definitely varieties of autocracies, just like there are varieties of democracies. And add to that, that the same democracy can change over time to be less democratic. That’s happening in the United States. That’s Freedom House data. It’s very clear to that. So on that dimension, for instance, I would put Singapore.
Singapore is an autocracy, but it’s a much different autocracy, and I’m going to choose extremes on purpose, than North Korea in terms of the way it governs, and therefore they behave differently in the international system, and I would much rather live in Singapore than North Korea personally, because it’s a better, more efficient kind of government.
Then within that, the Chinese autocratic regime is different than Russia. One is based on a party system, one is based on an individual, so they’re different. But then I would want to add this personality piece, because you’re absolutely right the way you described it. I share that assessment that Putin is not interested in multilateralism.
He wants to tear it all down. He wants to go back to the eighteenth century where states are the only thing that matters. That is not my assessment of Xi Jinping. Maybe a different communist leader might have that view, although that’s very hard to disentangle leaders and regimes in autocracies. But without question, China under Xi Jinping and the autocratic regime that he rules has a different strategy towards global order than Putin’s Russia.
There are two parts of it I would emphasize. One, as you already noted, they have a foot in the old system, the system that the United States built after World War II, and they don’t want to tear that down because it’s been good to them. They don’t want to blow up the United Nations. They don’t want to disassemble the world trade organizations.
Those are organizations that have facilitated their place in the world and their rise economically. They want to increase their power within them, just like any rising power would, but they don’t want to tear them down. But in parallel to that, they’re creating a whole set of new regional and other multilateral institutions where China is the anchor.
Belt and Road Initiative, AIIB, Shanghai Cooperation Organization, all the various regional multilateral groups they have with Asia, Latin America, Central Asia, Southeast Asia. They’re just really leaning into that. Xi Jinping just created one for AI regulation a couple weeks ago where they’re central to it, and they’re doing that at a time where the United States, and this predates Trump, but it’s been accelerated by Trump, we’re most certainly not building new ones.
I mean, there’s been minor ones, but Trans-Pacific Partnership was the last really big effort at a major multilateral economic organization to bring together the economies of the Pacific. Not all democracies, by the way, I should point that out, but most of them were. And, you know, that was when I was in the Obama administration.
It failed politically. We failed to get support for it, and it died. We really haven’t tried to do anything new of that magnitude ever since, and Trump most certainly, he’s a unilateralist. He thinks it’s not in our interest to be in the old one, so he’s not building anything new. There’s one exception, it’s called Pan Silica, I think, something that the State Department’s doing, so I want to give him credit for that.
But mostly, we’re not building new stuff, and we’re exiting the other ones, and I just think in the long run, that’s not very wise for America.
jmk: For the purposes of foreign policy, what is the line that designates somebody as a democracy for all intents and purposes? Not in terms of just this big picture theory idea, but in terms of these are countries that will have a natural affinity to work together because you’ve noted there’s a spectrum of where people fall between democracy and authoritarianism.
Ukraine’s a good example where people oftentimes consider that a hybrid regime for a long time. More democratic than Russia, but for a long time, people were very hesitant to even describe it as a democracy. A lot of people felt that it fell short of that measure. But after Russia invaded it, people were much more willing to describe it as a democracy and part of the democratic world.
Where do you think the practical line is for countries that would align together because of their regime type because they’re democratic?
Michael McFaul: So I’m going to answer theoretical and then practical. I want to do both because I’m not sure about the practical. That’s a really, really good question. On the theoretical, because I’ve been teaching and writing about this for a long time, I do think we have some basic red lines.
If the world has to be coded as red or blue, autocracy or democracy, and I take this definition from a political scientist, Adam Przeworski is his name. I think his is the best, and I’m just doing this from memory, but the rules of the game are known ahead of time for an election. There is a competitive election where the outcome is not automatically certain, so there’s some competition, and then there’s no veto player afterwards that can come and say, “Hey, wait a minute.
I don’t like this election. I’m going to get rid of what happened there,” right? I think that minimalist definition is the difference between autocracies and democracies. Now, all autocracies, not all, but most autocracies have elections. They go through certain kinds of things that they might look to be them, and that’s, by the way, interesting, right?
They want to pretend that they’re democracies. That’s already interesting to me that they’re not blatantly in some other place. But, you know, like Putin’s Russia, yeah, they just had an election for the parliament, but the main opposition parties were banned. There was no competition, and they don’t have any power.
I should have added that. They have to have meaning. The people you elect have to have some power to do anything. That’s another part of Adam’s definition. But to your point about Ukraine, that’s easy to say abstractly. Measuring it in the real world, these are shades of gray. And for many years, as you rightly pointed out, including in my own writing, Ukraine was coded for me as a semi-democracy or semi-autocracy.
I used to use the word semi-autocracy to describe that regime. These are shades of gray. I think that’s really important to acknowledge. And then when you think of Hungary as a really important case, because there are a lot of people that talked about Hungary under Viktor Orbán as being a dictatorship.
I was not one of those people, by the way. They eroded a lot of the institutions of democracy, but you don’t have changes of leadership in dictatorships through free and fair elections. That’s what happened in Hungary. That should be sobering for us to not be so flippant that we say, “Oh, well, that’s a dictatorship.”
No, Magyar worked really, really hard to win. He had to overcome all kinds of advantages that the autocratizing regime had put in place, but he did. That outcome would never happen, just to be clear, in China, Russia, North Korea or Iran. So that’s the difference. That shows us that there was more free press there.
There was more space for opposition leaders. I mean, it helped that he came from the old leading power, right? Fidesz. Another trend, by the way, when you get these democratic breakthroughs, it’s oftentimes defectors from the old ruling party. It’s not always the Mandelas and Havels of the world. You know, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, for instance, was led by this guy, Viktor Yushchenko, who used to work in the old semi-autocratic regime.
Same in Serbia in two thousand, going way back. But you asked a different question, which is I don’t have a good answer. I want to be honest to you, ’cause what does it mean practically? And I want to think about this harder. I’ll tell you intuitively, I was just in Australia about a week ago. I’d never been there.
First trip there, gave a book talk. And it’s something deeper than just the mechanics of what I was just talking about. There’s like this normative commitment to the free world. You know, they have problems with their democracy there, big disappointment with what the Trump administration is doing, and they have a lot of economic interaction, of course, with China.
You know, they’re one of those sandwich countries with relations with China and the United States. But there was this value thing that was just self-evident that was really striking to me. You know, thirty years ago, we would’ve called it the Western world, but you can’t call it the Western world when you’re sitting in Australia.
But there’s something deeper there that I’m not articulating, but it’s about values, not just about the mechanics of elections.
jmk: So how important do you think regime type is within foreign policy at the end of the day, though? Because we see the United States, even when it’s promoting democracy, still creating partnerships with autocratic countries such as Saudi Arabia’s longstanding partnership that we’ve had.
You mentioned Vietnam earlier. Obviously, democracies do work with autocracies. I mean, what’s the incentive for autocracies to work with democracies, and how much of a role does regime type really play in terms of the natural inclination to work together?
Michael McFaul: So this is a giant debate in American academia.
I think most people, this is my feeling, I don’t have the data in front of me, most professors who teach about international relations says regime type doesn’t matter. The theory is called realism. I hate that term ’cause I think what they talk about is unrealistic when translated into policy world.
But theoretically, they just say states are unitary actors, it doesn’t matter what happens inside, autocrats, democrats, doesn’t matter. It’s really the power, the distribution of power in the international system, and that tells you everything you need to know. And what’s so great about that theory, I teach this theory every year, not every year, ’cause I teach other things, but when I teach about international relations, I always teach this theory.
We spend a whole week on it, and John Mearsheimer is probably the most prominent realist in the public domain today. It’s a very eloquent theory. You don’t need to know much about anything, you have a theory to explain things. My problem with it theoretically is it doesn’t explain everything. You know, the rise and fall of great powers.
You get more powerful and then you have conflict. Thucydides Trap, this goes all the way back to Thucydides, and lots of people have written about it. In fact, Xi Jinping just talked about it last week in Washington, the Thucydides Trap. He literally talked about it in a press conference. Rising China, weakening America, conflict, all about power.
But I can think of cases where a rising power and a declining power did not go to war. I think of the change in leadership in the world between Great Britain and the United States. Why didn’t we go to war? I think regime type had a big role to play in that. More recently, I can think of countries that have become way more powerful in the last several decades.
Germany, I’m not worried about the United States going to war. Japan, way more powerful than nineteen forty-five. Why didn’t we have that debate when they were rising? And that I think is where regime type does matter. If you think about American history, yes, we’ve had friendly relations with autocracies, and I’m going to get to that ’cause I was an ambassador in an autocracy.
I want to talk about the practical parts of that in a minute. But we’ve never gone to war with a democracy. I mean, Trump said these crazy things about Denmark, but thankfully that’s been set aside. Conversely, when I think about all the countries that we have gone to major war with and are threatening to us today. They’re all autocracies, and I don’t think that’s a spurious correlation.
I think that is a dynamic. But I want to emphasize, ’cause I sometimes get cartoonized in this debate, and I want to make sure that doesn’t happen here. In my book, Autocrats Versus Democrats, there’s three whole chapters on power that have nothing to do with regime type, and they’re the first chapters in the book, some historical chapters.
But I deliberately put those chapters about power first and only talk about regime type after them because of course it’s the interaction between them. My gripe, you can see I’m getting animated here, with international relations theory is like, why can’t we look at both? Like, all kinds of other theories look at both.
I mean, causes of cancer. I have friends who work on fighting cancer here on campus. They don’t just look at one mono-causal theory, they look at multiple variables and, by the way, the interaction effects of multiple variables. So why can’t our theories do that too? It just seems to me this debate, I guess it goes all the way back to Thucydides, I don’t know that era well, but that you either got to be a realist or a liberal, I think has gotten in the way of understanding.
And the other thing I would say, look at what I just did grammatically. You have to be a liberal or a realist. That already sets it up that it’s not social science, that it’s not explanation, and that it’s more normative. I would even say religious, right? “What are you?” “Oh, I’m a Catholic.” “Oh, what are you?” “I’m a realist.”
That already suggests that it’s not social scientific and that it’s more ideological. And Mearsheimer and I disagree on a lot of things. I think he’s been wrong more than anybody, and sometimes you get cited a lot for being wrong. But one thing I do give him credit for is he writes about, in his most famous book about this, that there’s the theoretical part, but there’s also this prescriptive part, and he’s not afraid to say that there are these things, and I think if we were all a little more honest with that, we’d be better off.
But now on the practical part about dealing with autocrats. As an American, I most certainly believe in diplomacy that we have to have relationships with autocracies. I mean, I served in one. And, you know, when I was in Russia, it was an autocracy when I was there. I believe that there are certain circumstances when we have to engage with autocrats to advance our national interests, and we did that when I was in government.
Ronald Reagan did that with the Soviets when they were in government. George Shultz, the Secretary of State, was a big mentor of mine here at Stanford. But I would add a couple of things to that. One, you do so to advance your interests, not just to be friendly with them. I think this is a flaw, I would say, in Trump’s diplomacy, is that he sees a friendly relationship with Putin as the goal.
He sees a good meeting with Xi Jinping as the goal, whereas I see those meetings as means to achieving goals that are good for the American people. That’s the way you need to deal with those kind of regimes. And the second thing I would say, and I learned this from George Shultz, is when you’re engaging with autocrats, you don’t need to check your values at the door.
They’re not asking you to do that, by the way, so why do it? And when you do that, I think it’s a sign of weakness. I think it’s a signal. I mean, the guy I know the best is Putin. I’ve dealt with him. You genuflect to him and you call him your buddy and you say, “Oh, values don’t matter to me,” that’s, in his eyes, a sign of weakness, not strength.
Doesn’t mean you have to be in his face all the time. You got to talk about, like, arms control and other things. But pretending that these things don’t matter, I don’t think is necessary. And then the third thing I would say related to that is because we are a democracy, your engagement with autocratic regimes will be challenged by the American people.
And so some of us, me included, I don’t like how close we are to the Saudis. I knew Jamal Khashoggi. I personally knew him. He was killed by this regime in a horrific way. That makes me angry, and I’m an American too. Just to pretend that that doesn’t matter because we need energy from Saudi Arabia, for me, that doesn’t work that way, and, you know, I’m just one voter.
But there are millions of Americans, I can tell you, both from the data and my own anecdotal experience speaking about this book, I think I’ve been in 16 states now talking about this stuff. Some Americans, not all, but some Americans actually do think we should be a moral force in the world and not just, you know, be this transactional leader.
They don’t like it when we invade other countries. They don’t like it when we take resources from other places. And so if you want to be effective as a leader of the United States, to just pretend that values don’t matter, I think you can get yourself in trouble with your own constituencies when you talk in those terms.
jmk: Do you really think America’s in decline?
Because China’s clearly on the rise still. They’ve clearly moved up dramatically in terms of power within the last 20, 25, 30 years. However, the United States, for instance, in terms of nominal GDP share in the world, is actually larger than it was in 1991 by, like, a hair. It feels like the conversation that America is in decline is a little bit overstated.
However, it does feel that America’s allies have been in decline. Like, the rise of China seems to have come at the expense of Europe, Japan, in terms of economic and probably in terms of military capacity as well, they’ve probably been overtaken. How do you feel in terms of that?
Michael McFaul: Yeah. So the last chapter of my book is called Don’t Bet Against America Yet, because when I go through all the data, I land where you do.
The metaphor I have in my head, and I heard this, by the way, I want to give him credit ’cause I use it and I… Actually, maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe he wouldn’t want me to give him credit. But it’s a scholar from Peking University. It might get him in trouble if I said his name, so I won’t. I had this conversation with him, like, several years ago, so it’s his metaphor, but I think it’s really right.
So when I was a kid, I used to run track. I used to run the two-mile race. I was good at it for one year. Like, I went undefeated in ninth grade. But my strategy was always to get out in front first, and then to hold on. Other people had different strategies, right? You hang back, you overtake the person.
Mine was always get out in front first. And we’re out in front, the United States. China is that closer. They’re closing the gap. They’re getting closer and closer, but we’re still running fast. Your point is really important. It’s not one’s declining and one’s rising. We’re moving really fast, and in some places we’re moving really fast, but they have not caught up.
And on some metrics, you know, GDP per capita, for instance, I talk about that in my book, my prediction is they’ll never catch up. We will always be ahead GDP per capita. They’re just so far behind. We’re in the top seven. They’re like sixty-fifth, sixty-sixth. I don’t think they’ll ever catch up, but I’m not sure they’re going to catch up with us.
And your other point, that we’ve been steady as a percentage of the world, we’ve been holding our own for 30 years. We’re not declining. What has changed, to your point, is the Chinese are rising as a percentage of global GDP and our allies are declining. Whether that’s a correlation or a causation, that’s a big complicated question, but that’s troubling to me and I want our allies to be stronger.
I want them to be more competitive. I want them to have AI companies. I want them to have great drone companies, you know, learn from the Ukrainians. And we want, in my view, collectively to strengthen the free world, and that they have been falling behind, Europe in particular, that’s not good for stability in the world as a whole.
jmk: Has the war with Ukraine changed Russia’s foreign policy or has it just exposed it?
Michael McFaul: Yes and no. So Putin has always had these imperial proclivities, a recreation of the Russian Empire, not the Soviet Union, the Russian Empire. When you listen to him, it’s about that. It’s not about, you know, bringing back Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.
He’s not interested in that. But now it’s accelerated it because he’s so in over his head in Ukraine, and he just keeps doubling down, tripling down, slaughtering not only Ukrainians, of course, but his own young people. If I were a Russian nationalist, I would just see this war as a catastrophic mistake for Russian national interests.
But that’s not the way he looks at it, and so that means he’s just become unidimensional, that this is the imperial war he needs to win, and therefore, I think making a lot of mistakes as a result of that.
jmk: So I’ve heard a lot of people, Mearsheimer’s one of them, there’s plenty of other people who make the case that if the United States and the West would’ve not engaged with Ukraine and just cut ties with them, let them float into Russia’s orbit, that Russia wouldn’t have felt the need to be able to invade them, that it was our fault for overly engaging with Ukraine that’s caused the war.
I feel that Russia seems to have always expected that they were going to rejoin with Ukraine, that eventually they wanted to invade and take over Ukraine, whether peacefully or militarily. And it feels like maybe Putin, the reason why he invaded Ukraine when he did was because he was worried that things were getting so far out of his grasp that it was almost like the last-ditch effort to be able to do that.
And if you think about it that way, Russia’s a country that was always going to have military inclinations. How do you feel in terms of that? Do you feel that Russia would have, or at least Putin felt that he wanted to eventually take over Ukraine? Or do you think that that was something that is a new interest that developed over time?
Michael McFaul: Yeah. And then you caught yourself, you kept saying Russia thinks, and then you changed to Putin, and that’s part of this analytic difference, right? And I think it’s an important distinction. Although I want to say, you know, these arguments are hard, but let’s wrestle with them. So first, why did Ukraine become independent?
Well, there are a lot of factors, but one of them was that there was a democratic revolution inside Russia. No democratic movement in Russia, Ukraine does not become independent. So it was Russian. Not only there was a Ukrainian independence movement too, but let’s be clear, Russians were part of that. And I went to those meetings.
I was living in the Soviet Union in nineteen ninety, nineteen ninety-one. Democratic Russia was organizing anti-Soviet demonstrations. Those were Russians on the street. There were some Ukrainians and Armenians and Latvians, but they were protesting to destroy the Soviet Union. When they got together and signed the agreement on August eighth, nineteen ninety-one, that was Yeltsin’s idea.
That’s how Ukraine became independent. So the notion that it was always a Russian design to take over Ukraine, that wasn’t Yeltsin’s view. That wasn’t the view of the leaders of democratic Russia. That’s first thing I wanted to say. Second thing, when Putin came into government, to this notion that this is all about stopping NATO expansion, I just think it’s really important to go back and read what he said.
People want to cherry-pick the history, and I know maybe some will accuse me of doing that, but when he became president, he said we should join NATO. Now, hold on a minute, John Mearsheimer. You say that NATO expansion is the thing that worries Putin the most. He wanted to join this evil alliance. That doesn’t make any sense from your theory about NATO being so threatening.
Two thousand two, he was asked should Ukraine join NATO. He said, “That’s their business. That’s not my business.” That’s Putin that said that. That’s not Garry Kasparov or Alexei Navalny. That’s Putin that said that. And then what really happened, I think the real threat, and your point, your analytics are right as long as we add it was drifting away.
That’s exactly the right metaphor, but it wasn’t drifting away to NATO. Ukraine was drifting away to democracy, to the EU, to be separate from the Russian Empire. NATO was like a back burner issue. That’s what Putin fears and feared the most. The main rupture… You know, remember, people forget, Bush and Putin were very close.
After September 11th, they were fighting terrorism together. The rupture in their relationship was not NATO expansion. Everybody go back and look at it. 2002, it’s announced, the big bang, the Baltic States are going to get in. Putin doesn’t like it, he doesn’t cheer it, but it’s not a major event in US-Russian relations.
It’s the Orange Revolution in Ukraine that’s the main rupture, ’cause that is threatening to Putin and the way that he governs at home. And I’ve heard him say it. I’ve been in meetings with him where he says, “We’re not part of your decadent liberal world. Russian civilization, we’re separate from that.” But if these Ukrainians, who he also calls Russians with accents, to your point, I’ve literally heard him say that, if they’re practicing democracy, well, that undermines his argument about czarism and strong state and Russian civilization as being separate from Europe.
So I do think that that was the driver, not NATO expansion. And the last thing I’ll just say on this, I was in the government for five years. It’s not like I just watched this. I was there from 2009 to ’14. NATO expansion was not an issue at all in US-Russian relations because he ended that, tragically, but I just think we need to call it straight.
Putin ended that debate when he invaded Georgia in 2008. After that, when I got to the government six or seven months later and I finally got read into all the debates in NATO, not just America, about bringing in Georgia, there was nobody interested in bringing in Georgia because they didn’t want to go to war with Russia.
And then the next year, his guy, Yanukovych, is elected president of Ukraine. He came to Washington. There was no push for them to join NATO in that period. It’s only when there’s revolution, regime change, revolution of dignity is what the Ukrainians call it, Putin calls it a CIA orchestrated plot, but it’s only after there’s regime change in 2014 that he invade Ukraine.
It wasn’t because of NATO expansion, it was because of those events, and I think that the multiple drivers, and of course he would prefer to see no NATO expansion. Obviously, his war got two really powerful countries into NATO. He tried to stop it in Ukraine, and he ended up getting Finland and Sweden into the alliance from a strategic perspective, creating a whole lot more trouble.
I think they have an 800-mile border with the Finns, and they have a lot of military capacity, both those countries. But I’m getting distracted. I think that drifting was not about, “Oh my gosh, they’re about to join NATO,” ’cause they weren’t. And by the way, I hosted Zelensky here at Stanford the day after he met President Biden, literally the day after.
And he asked me, “Why do you guys say all this NATO membership stuff but you never want to do anything for us?” Because it was always this, “Yeah, aspirations, we’re not going to close the door,” but there was no push to bring Ukraine into NATO under the Biden administration, and nobody in Brussels was pushing for it, nobody in Washington was pushing for it, and they all knew that in Moscow as well.
jmk: I would completely agree with you that it wasn’t NATO expansion. And regime change was a major factor in terms of how Russia approached Ukraine and really all of its neighbors. But I think in the book and in some of your other writings and talks, I think you also make the point that it feels like it’s the regime change within Russia itself that was just as important, if not more important, to how it behaves towards Ukraine, Georgia, and really all of its neighbors, to be honest with you.
Which then begs the question about the United States, which has experienced significant democratic decline, and now we even have people like Steve Levitsky and Lucan Way who are now describing the United States as a competitive authoritarian or what some might call a hybrid regime. And it raises the question of whether the United States is acting as a democratic state within its foreign policy.
And so how do you feel that the geopolitical rivalry with China and Russia has affected democracy itself within the United States?
Michael McFaul: So another excellent question that I don’t have an excellent answer for. I know Lucan Way and Steve Levitsky. I didn’t know they’ve already gone to semi-authoritarianism.
They’re some of the people that have been trying to figure out this gray zone for a long time, and I used to participate in those debates academically twenty years ago, and it’s important stuff. I still think we’re a democracy. I would not use autocracy as the noun in that we’re going to have elections in thirty-five days, and I don’t know who’s going to win.
There are some people trying to change the rules of the game, but whether they can or not, you know, there’s a fight about that. So that meets my minimalist definition with Przeworski. But there’s no question that drift, the autocratic drift that we’re in today is greater than any time in my lifetime, and I’m not a expert on America, but people around here at Stanford who are that say you got to go back to, you know, the Civil War to remember a time like this.
So that is happening. And then, two, back to personalities, ’cause in my book I talk about power regimes and leaders, ’cause leaders also get written out of political science pretty quickly when it comes to foreign policy. I think leaders matter, and in this case, Trump himself, you know, I’m just not sure what side of the fence he’s on when it comes to autocrats versus democrats.
I mean, he’s only greeted with a red carpet at the tarmac two leaders in the world so far, to the best of my count, Putin and Xi Jinping. That’s extraordinary. That’s never happened in American history, to the best of my knowledge. I think Kennedy was the last president to go out to the tarmac. That was for our democratic ally, Great Britain, not the leader of the Communist Party of China.
That’s just extraordinary. We just need to emphasize that. And two, he’s not doing anything to support ideas of freedom, liberty, rule of law, democracy around the world. On the contrary, he shut down USAID, he tried to gut Voice of America. They’ve tried to kill the National Endowment for Democracy. That’s his personal policies.
And then three, adding to the misery from my point of view, many of his actions are anti-democratic at home, so we’re not inspiring anybody to be like us. The polling data on that is pretty overwhelming. And then we’re doing things that the rest of the world think are anti-democratic. When we use force in Venezuela, and now we’re taking their resources when we went to war with Iran.
I think we shouldn’t conflate those things with democracy, but you talk to people around the world, and it’s in the Pew survey data pretty clearly, they think we’re behaving like a rogue state. You know, where they compare us to Putin and back to Xi Jinping, like he looks like he’s the guy who supports the rules-based international order.
And that makes our ability to compete, especially with China, a lot more constrained. Now, having said all that, the good thing, if I’m right and that we’re still a democracy, one, we can debate these issues. If we were living in Xi Jinping’s China or Putin’s Russia, we couldn’t be talking about this stuff the way we are right now.
And we still have that ability, and by the way, that’s the main reason why I wrote this book, was to bring these ideas to the public debate. And I think a mistake that a lot of foreign policy elites made in both the Democratic Party and Republican Party is they just forgot about the American people.
They just said, “You know, we got this, you know, don’t question what we’re doing.” That was a mistake. So we can have a debate about these things, and what’s striking to me is Trump’s policies are not only not very popular in Australia, I can tell you, I was just there, or Sweden, where I was two months ago, or Estonia, where I was a few months ago.
They’re not popular in America. Embracing Putin, that’s not a popular idea. Going to war in Iran, that’s not a popular idea. Getting in fights with our democratic friends to the north in Canada, those are not popular ideas. And that means to me, because we still have elections that matter, the possibility of a democratic renewal, both in terms of how we practice democracy at home, but then how we can be a better citizen for supporting these ideas of freedom and democracy abroad.
And the last thing I want to say on this, my critics always say, “Oh, you’re such an imperialist, you know, you’re exporting these ideas.” But I just want to underscore the data again. Everybody go look at Pew polling. There’s lots of polling out there. Look up support for democracy on whatever platform you use.
And what you’ll see, we don’t need to export ideas about freedom and democracy because those ideas are already really popular around the world. They’re really popular. So this notion we got to convince people, no. Not all their leaders support those ideas, obviously, and there are lots of autocrats who don’t.
But I think if we pivoted and got back to just saying, “Well, we think democracy’s better than autocracy,” doesn’t mean we need to invade. That doesn’t work as a very good tool. But once we realign ourselves with small D democrats and what I would call not just American values, but universal values, I think there’s going to be a lot more goodwill out there than people think.
jmk: Michael McFaul, thanks again. The book, one more time, is Autocrats vs Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you so much for writing the book.
Michael McFaul: Thanks for having me. Great conversation.
Links
Learn more about Michael McFaul.
Learn more about his book Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder (Harper Collins).
Learn more about the Kellogg Institute
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