In this excerpt from Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson, senior fellow Michael McFaul, a former ambassador to Russia, examines the policies and psychology of Russia’s autocratic leader. Watch the full interview here.
Peter Robinson: Michael McFaul is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and a professor of international studies, all here at Stanford. He served on the National Security Council during the first three years of the Obama administration, and then as ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014. His most recent book is Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder.
In Autocrats versus Democrats, you write about Russia after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union: “For me, the question was whether Russia would consolidate democracy and remain inside our tent or drift back toward its long tradition of autocratic governance.”
A return to dictatorship is precisely what happened. Why?
Michael McFaul: I still believe that sentence. And I have a very vivid memory, Peter, of saying that to the president of the United States, George W. Bush, two or three weeks before he met with Vladimir Putin. We were having a debate about Russian power—Russia, you know, was very weak.
Peter Robinson: A number of scholars argue that NATO expansion poisoned our relations with Russia. We brought in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and so forth. Historian Mary Sarotte said, “Washington wins its struggle with Moscow over NATO in the 1990s, but the way the United States goes about enlargement means it loses options with regard to Russia in the longer term. The big play in Europe would have been to create a dynamic that established lasting cooperation, rather than confrontation, between Russia and the West”—which sounds a lot like what you were telling George W. Bush. Instead, Washington and Moscow snatched stalemate from the jaws of victory. It’s our fault and the proximate cause is the expansion of NATO. True?
Michael McFaul: No. I radically disagree with that.
Peter Robinson: We didn’t make some mistakes?
Michael McFaul: The biggest mistake we made was in the Nineties. When we thought the Cold War was over and we had won, it was “the end of history”—that’s what Frank Fukuyama wrote in that famous essay—and we did nothing to help rebuild Russia in our community of states, the exact opposite of what we did in World War II. After that war, we brought in Germany and Italy and Japan because there was this menacing threat to the East.
NATO expansion is a variable in US-Russia and US-Soviet relations. So, it’s not always neutral. But there were many times when it was a non-issue. When Putin came to power, he said, “I want to join NATO.” It’s on the record. He said it. He also said back then that Ukraine should join NATO, no big deal.
I went to a NATO summit in Lisbon when I worked at the White House in 2010. President Dmitry Medvedev was there, and he said that all of our animosity with NATO is over. And by the way, the last big bang of NATO expansion was in 2004, under President George W. Bush.
So, I think this is a very convenient retrospective thing that Putin wants to drag out to say NATO has been threatening Russia. NATO has never threatened to invade Russia or the Soviet Union.
The real threat is not NATO expansion. The real threat is democratic expansion. What scares Putin the most is when Ukrainians are practicing democracy. That threatens him because back home he tells the Russian people, we’re not part of this liberal decadent West. We’re our own civilization. And then he also tells his people back home that Ukrainians are just Russians with accents, and that’s part of why he needs to bring together the Slavic nation.
But if they’re just Russians with accents practicing democracy, practicing capitalism—that is a threat to Vladimir Putin, not NATO expansion.
The Russian mind
Peter Robinson: I’m going to quote Autocrats versus Democrats: “Vladimir Putin has demonstrated a willingness to deploy his government’s resources to intervene in the domestic affairs of other countries.” In 2008 he goes into Georgia; in 2014 annexation of Crimea; and then of course the 2022 invasion of Ukraine proper—so to speak, what’s left of Ukraine. And here’s the question. What is it about Russia?
You have a couple of periods. Alexander II frees the serfs. And then twenty years later, he’s assassinated. Then Nicholas II permits the establishment of a Duma in 1905. It looks like a moment when they’re actually going to have some form of fresh beginning—and then we have the First World War, and the communists take over.
With Putin, here we have a man who is behaving in the year 2026 in a way that Ivan the Terrible and Catherine the Great would have both recognized and approved of. During the Nineties there’s a moment of hopefulness under Yeltsin—and the “reset” works for a time. But then it falls back into this autocratic pattern which has lasted at least a thousand years.
Michael McFaul: That’s a really hard question. At Stanford, sometimes I teach about Russian politics and I show that chart of a thousand years, as well as the Freedom House scores. And it’s all autocratic, with those two blips that you mentioned. Other scholars have a lot of data to support their hypothesis that there must be some cultural proclivity towards autocracy among the Russians. And I want to be really sincere with you: I used to flatly reject those kinds of arguments. Those are arguments we used to make about the Germans and the Japanese. There was even a prominent professor at Stanford forty years ago who said Catholic countries have a proclivity towards autocracy because we all love the pope. Latin America was all Catholic, Southern Europe was Catholic.
So, I’m in this structure-versus-agency debate. But culture is hard, isn’t it? Culture is sticky. It doesn’t fade away.
Russia didn’t make a hard break with its Soviet history in 1991. Germany, through tragedy and by necessity, had the heartbreak and the Nuremberg trials. We said Nazis are not going to be part of their future. The Soviets didn’t do that in ’91. They were afraid that if they went too fast and too hard against the KGB, that might spur a counterrevolution. As a result, a guy like Putin can come along from the KGB. And by the way, remember that he can use part of that history to blame everything on the West and go back to Russian roots.
I still believe in the power of agency to change. I still believe in socioeconomic development. Countries that get rich tend to become more democratic. Five hundred years ago, the whole world was autocratic; now that’s not true. Richest countries are where you also see freedom.
But since Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, I have to tell you, honestly, I’m more skeptical about my own arguments about agency and institutions. I see the atrocities that Russians are executing and implementing inside Ukraine. It’s not just Putin. He has managed to use these cultural imperial narratives to say this is who we are, and this is naturally our territory.
I’ll tell you the moment when it really hit me. I was having this argument with President Zelensky’s chief of staff at the time, Andriy Yermak.
Peter Robinson: This is before or after the invasion?
Michael McFaul: After the invasion. I have a lot of connectivity with the Ukrainians.
We’ve been doing our leadership program here at Stanford for twenty years and about 250 Ukrainians have gone through it. In fact, I brought President Zelensky here in 2021. Nobody knew who he was back then.
Peter Robinson: A year later?
Michael McFaul: A year later he would have seen much bigger crowds.
But we’re kind of arguing about this: is there any hope with the democratic opposition in Russia? And he played for me this tape of a Russian soldier who had just committed atrocities in a suburb of Kiev called Bucha. It was a phone call to his girlfriend, I think, in Barcelona, who was shopping. [Yermak and I] were arguing about sanctions, and the question was, should a whole society be punished for what Putin is doing? Andre said that because I was involved in writing papers about this, I should listen to this tape.
The soldier is proud of the atrocities. I’m not going to go into the details of his horrors; it’s not proper for your show.
That made me rethink: maybe these cultural things are stickier than I understand. And I would add to that: propaganda works. If you control everything, you can make people believe things that are not true. Putin’s done that.
And he’s not just looking for a deal. He’s an ideologue. He is motivated by his ideas, his imperial ideas. If it was just cost-benefit analysis, he wouldn’t let a million Russians be killed or wounded on the battlefield. That’s a pretty irrational way to gain inches of territory. He wants to be Peter the Great. He wants to be Catherine the Great. He wants to be known as the guy that expanded the Russian Empire and he’s willing to pay whatever it costs.
The mark of “Davos Man”
Peter Robinson: Toward the end of his life, Samuel Huntington, one of the pre-eminent political scientists of the twentieth century—although I believe he wrote this essay just inside the twenty-first century—wrote an essay in which he coined the term “Davos Man.” He made the point in this famous essay that for the first time in its history, the United States of America had produced a class that had no use for the United States itself. He called it Davos Man because he seemed to believe that you could see them on display at the World Economic Forum.
They had no use for national boundaries. They had very little use for national currencies; as for immigration, they just wanted inexpensive workers.
Does the United States of America, this anachronistic object brought into being 250 years ago, still matter? How do you answer that?
Michael McFaul: Well, that’s easy for me. Of course, America still matters. Sovereignty still matters.
I think that “Davos Man” metaphor created a lot of trouble for us. Foreign policy elites, Democrats and Republicans alike, just thought it didn’t matter what the American people thought. “We know what’s good for America. We’re going to do it this way.” And that created a huge disconnect between the way Americans thought about the outside world and the way Davos men and women think about it. And that led to some really bad policies.
The mission of my book, honestly, is to take on these debates about why engaging in the world is in our national interest. Why having allies is in our national interest, why supporting ideas of freedom, democracy, and liberty is in the long-term national interest of the United States.
But we have to win that argument in Bozeman, Montana, and Boise, Idaho. And in Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio.
It’s not easy, but the way you do it is to appeal to American national interests. We’re all Americans first. We can’t keep calling fellow Americans enemies; that’s not patriotism.
We have to be united, because if we’re not, we lose the twenty-first century.
