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The similarities between what is happening today and what I witnessed in Vladimir Putin’s Russia are frightening: the creation of an oligarchy, the proclamation of a one-party system, and, perhaps most troubling, a promised crackdown on free speech. We are seeing Donald Trump and those around him pick targets to go after, and make them obey the administration’s wishes.
My guest today, Michael McFaul, witnessed such moves when he was the U.S. ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014, and he has a warning for Americans today.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
[Music]
Garry Kasparov: When people ask me what I make of Donald Trump and the state of American democracy, I tell them that alarm bells are ringing everywhere. The similarities between what is happening today in America and what I witnessed in Vladimir Putin’s Russia are frightening.
We are seeing the creation of an oligarchy, where those in power and those with money slowly merge. We are seeing the proclamation of a one-party system. And, perhaps most troubling, we are seeing Donald Trump and those around him pick targets to go after, and make them obey the administration’s wishes.
To anyone who has witnessed an autocrat come to power, this is chilling. And it’s why we’re bringing you a special episode.
[Music]
Kasparov: From The Atlantic, this is Autocracy in America. I’m Garry Kasparov.
My guest today is Michael McFaul, the U.S. ambassador to Russia in the years following Putin’s return to the presidency. He saw an autocracy take hold before his eyes, and he has a warning for those in America who seem ready to capitulate to the Trump administration.
[Music]
Kasparov: Mike, I want to thank you for joining the show. For those who are not familiar with you, I believe you are one of the best American experts about Russia. You have long studied Russia as a country and a place, and you speak Russian fluently. But we should have this conversation in English, okay?
Michael McFaul: (Laughs.) Yes, of course. Well, thanks for having me, Garry. It’s a real honor to be on with you. And you’ve studied Russia for a long time, and you’re actually fluent in Russian, too, so I hope this will be a conversation, because you know as much about this topic as I do. So great to be with you, though.
Kasparov: Okay. Very good. One of the earlier guests on this show was Jake Sullivan, and I asked him about American foreign policy toward Russia, just to cover the 25 years since the appearance of Vladimir Putin as the top man in Russia, or you can go even back to 1991. Something did go wrong. Very quickly, can you summarize it before we start talking about your own experience there?
McFaul: So when the Soviet Union collapsed—and that was a euphoric moment for me personally— there was a bet by the West, and most certainly by the United States, that if we could facilitate the consolidation of democracy and capitalism in Russia, that would be good for security in Europe and be good for the United States. And I was a part of that. I moved to Moscow. I’ve lived there before, during the Soviet period, but I moved in the summer of 1992 to open the offices of an organization called the National Democratic Institute. And our commitment was to facilitate ideas about democracy, institutions about democracy.
And that was a bet that I think Democrats and Republicans made together. I think it was the right bet, by the way, with one big mistake. We should have had a hedge to that bet. We should have had a hedge to the rest of Europe, and we should have brought in the rest of Europe that wanted to join NATO faster. And to those that did not, were not qualified to join, we should have armed them in case that project failed. Because, as we all know, that project did fail.
Kasparov: Okay. So you have been actively engaged in formulating Russian policy and advising, but at one point you became the center man of United States policy to Russia as an ambassador in Moscow. So you arrived in Russia in 2012 as the architect of the [Barack] Obama–administration effort to engage with Russia, the so-called reset policy. By the way, is it fair to call you the architect of it?
McFaul: I don’t know. That’s an overstatement, I would say, but I was most certainly was part of that process for sure. Because I was working at the White House at the time.
Kasparov: So now to tell us about your experience in Russia.
McFaul: Well, let me start a few years earlier, with the origins of the Obama administration and our approach toward Russia. So we had this approach that I took right out of George Shultz’s memoirs—George Shultz was the former secretary of state in the [Ronald] Reagan era, and I think it’s chapter 27 where he talks about reengaging the Soviets. And this is years before [Mikhail] Gorbachev came along—and his strategy was a very clear one, which is that on some issues we have to deal with Moscow.
Back then, the early years of Reagan, they had no contact with Moscow at all. That was the Evil Empire. And Shultz said, No, we’ve got talk to them about, like, arms control and nuclear stuff. But we’re gonna do that without 1) checking our values at the door and without 2) throwing other countries under the bus. And I’m paraphrasing, of course; he didn’t write in such blunt terms. But that was his strategy. And I thought that should be our strategy.
So with the government, we had some things we wanted to get done that only engaging with the government we could do. The biggest one was the new START [Strategic Arms Reduction] treaty. The old one was expiring in 2009. We thought it was in America’s national interest to do a new one. And we did. And we reduced by 30 percent the number of nuclear weapons in the world. But I wanna be clear; it wasn’t holding hands and singing “Kumbaya” with [Dmitry] Medvedev or Putin. And these were really concrete things, but we had this other strategy that was very controversial in our own government.
Garry, just so you know, and you actually sparked—I don’t know if you know this, I’m gonna tell you now—you actually sparked this debate. Because we had this idea of dual-track diplomacy: that we’re gonna engage with the government, but we’re also gonna engage with civil society, business students, and even the political opposition. And so my first trip to Moscow working at the National Security Council, we were doing the invite list for a reception at Spaso House. And I put your name on the list, and there was pushback. There was like, Oh my goodness; we’re in this moment of engagement with the Russians. We can’t invite Garry Kasparov. The people in the Kremlin will be upset about it. But I prevailed, and I just tell that vignette because I want to be clear that that was the strategy. The president agreed with that strategy. So when we came in July for his first visit to Moscow as a president, he had his meetings with Medvedev. Then we, the next day, we went out and spent four hours with the prime minister, Putin. And then the rest of the day, he spoke to students at the New Economic School. He went to business summits. He then attended a civil-society summit, which Medvedev chose not to do, and he ended his day in a roundtable with Russian opposition leaders. Garry, you were there too. I have that photo on my desk.
It’s important to understand that, because when things were more cooperative, that dual-track diplomacy—it wasn’t big news. It wasn’t, Oh my goodness, Obama’s fomenting regime change in Russia. But by the time I got to Moscow in 2012, as you know well, there was a massive mobilization against falsified elections in December of 2011, a parliamentary election. And it was just falsified, kind of like a normal Russian—it was nothing, nothing exceptional or extraordinary about the level of falsification to us. But that’s not the way Russians, including you and people like you, perceived it.
And with technology, there were these massive mobilizations against the regime. First for free and fair elections, and then for a Russia without Putin: that became one of the slogans. And when that happened, the Kremlin blamed us. In fact Medvedev, even before I got to Moscow, called President Obama, and he said, What are you guys doing? You’re funding NGOs that are seeking our overthrow. Your secretary of state sent a signal—this is what he said—to protest against our regime. And he was obviously just mimicking the words handed to him by Putin, but that the mood had changed radically.
So by the time I got there, I was perceived as, and portrayed as, somebody sent to Moscow to foment revolution against Putin. And I wanna be crystal clear. That was not my assignment. If it was, we would’ve messed it up anyway, right? We’re not very good at that. But there’s no doubt that, whether they believed it or not, Putin adopted an extremely hostile position toward me.
And he expressed that, by the way, to me from time to time personally. He said, We know what you’re doing here, and we’re gonna stop you. I’m paraphrasing, but he said that to me a couple of times. So, for the rest of my time in Moscow, I mean, I had, ironically or paradoxically, I did have relations with other parts of the government, but not with Vladimir Putin.
Kasparov: I can confirm that American participation in the protest of 2011, 2012 was minimal. I can even add that those groups—those NGOs mentioned by Medvedev that were funded by Americans—they were the least radical. As a matter of fact, the real push to become more aggressive and just to go to the streets and to protest these fake elections came from people like myself that were not on the funding list.
McFaul: Exactly.
Kasparov: It’s quite a paradox. But you describe what I saw—and I, by the way, believe at that time it was a mistake—a lot of American goodwill. So you tried. But Vladimir Putin’s agenda, to my knowledge, was already quite clear. I mean, he was quite consistent in expanding Russian imperial influence. So what did go wrong? I mean, at what point do you—and again, I say you [meaning] Americans—recognize that this policy was a failure?
McFaul: Well, let me tell you about me personally, and then the Obama administration and later the Biden administration. We’ll get to it. So for me personally, I never had any illusions about Putin and his agenda. There was no doubt when he became interim president and then president that he had an antidemocratic agenda, to me. And I—people can go look it up, so you don’t think I’m just making this up post facto—I wrote my first anti-Putin piece in The Washington Post in March of 2000, even before he was inaugurated as president, saying it’s very clear he does not believe in democracy. That was clear to me. For me, the day that Putin announced that he was running for president again—September 23 or 24, 2011—that was the day that the reset ended for me.
And I actually briefed the president after that a few days later. And I just said, we’re not gonna be able to work with this guy at all. And [Obama] said—he kind of agreed with me analytically, and then he was like, Well, but we don’t have a choice. We don’t get to choose who we have to interact with. But for me—and that, I want to emphasize, that was before the massive protest, right? And I’d already been nominated to be the U.S. ambassador. And I even thought about whether I should withdraw because I just—for me, that was it, that was the end. But not everybody agreed with me. If you’re working on arms control, you don’t care about protests, and you don’t want to get in the way of talking about these other things. But that was, that was it for me.
I think for the rest of them, I think it took until Putin invaded the first time in 2014 and seized Crimea, when at least the Obama administration thought all bets were off. But then we would get to the Biden folks. They came in, and their first big idea about Russia was We want a—I’m paraphrasing, but pretty closely—a stable and predictable relationship with Russia. And, you know, they tried to achieve that. And they even had a summit in Geneva to try to stabilize Russia, if you will, so that they could focus on China. So even they kind of relitigated where the end of the Obama administration was.
Kasparov: Now, as of today, there are some who argue that there is still room to engage with Russia. In fact, one of the guests on this podcast earlier this season, George Friedman, made that very case. What do you think?
McFaul: Just, I’m hard—I’m hard pressed to think what that might be. I mean, maybe some extension of the START treaty that’s gonna expire next year? That could be one area.
Kasparov: But can you trust Putin?
McFaul: Well, my general strategy and thinking is no. And we have to go back to a modern, modernized version of containment, including economic containment, just like we had this thing called CoCom [the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls] during the Cold War. We need that in place as a way to contain the pernicious elements of interaction with Russian elites, including Russian companies today.
Kasparov: We’ll be right back.
[Break]
Kasparov: So you were in Moscow in the period when Putin was reelected and consolidated his power and rule.
McFaul: Yes.
Kasparov: So last week you wrote that many Russian oligarchs didn’t resist Putin’s early autocratic moves because he offered them some kind of deals; he cut their taxes. And then years later they regretted their passivity when they had the power to resist. Can you be just more specific? Describe more about that.
McFaul: Yeah. So when Putin first came in—and he was an accidental president, you know, he wasn’t, he didn’t have some great movement behind him, picked by some of these oligarchs as a way to stop another guy, [Yevgeny] Primakov, from becoming president. There’s a mythology, including here in the United States, that there was this groundswell of support for Putin’s style of illiberal nationalism. And that’s just—it’s just not true. I mean, that’s just not true. He was picked by [Boris] Yeltsin.
Right away, he did two things simultaneously. On the economic side, he brought in those, you know, in Russia they would be called liberal reformers. Here in the United States they would be called conservatives. And in particular, he cut individual income tax to a flat tax at 13 percent. He then cut corporate taxes, and for the business community and the oligarchs, they welcomed that.
At the same time, he went after media very aggressively. And that was the first thing he went after. He wanted to control the media, and he took over the two state-controlled channels pretty easily. And one of the oligarchs had to flee and later died mysteriously in London, who controlled that. Boris Berezovsky.
But the real drama, as you’ll remember, was about NTV, an independent station owned by another oligarch. [Vladimir] Gusinsky was his name. And they did a couple of things. First of all—and this is the echoes of the moment we’re in, in the United States—eventually one of the state-owned enterprises loyal to Putin, Gazprom, and its branch called Gazprom Media, took over NTV. And it was all, Oh, it was just a business interest. Right? You know, that’s what we hear today. It’s just a business interest, just, you know, no big deal. And then two years later one of the most famous satirical shows, called Kukly [“Puppets”], was taken off the air. And that’s the echo of the moment we’re in now.
Then—and these are not, I wanna be careful. History rhymes, but it’s not exactly the same. And I don’t want to stretch the metaphor. And there’s some good things about America that we have, that Russia did not have then, that you’ve written, talked about recently.
But there was this other pivotal moment. It was this horrible tragedy, as you remember: this terrorist attack on a school in Beslan, Russia. And it was just horrific, the whole thing. And that moment of tragedy was used as an excuse by Putin to cancel gubernatorial elections, to cancel elections for the equivalent of American states.
And there—one more moment that was in this troika that was really important. It happened in 2003, when somebody you know well, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, at the time the most successful and richest businessman in Russia. And he wasn’t just the richest businessman in Russia, by the way. He was also an entrepreneur. He was not an oligarch, owning a state-owned enterprise. That gets garbled in American media sometimes. But he also began to see the trend lines with Putin. And he tried to do some things about it. And he got arrested, and he spent another decade in jail.
Kasparov: And his company has been first nationalized and then taken by one of Putin’s closest henchman.
McFaul: Right. Igor Sechin. And you put those three things together. That’s when this notion that He’s gonna cut our taxes, and everything’s gonna be okay, that’s when those people—and I don’t wanna overemphasize how well I knew them, but I knew some of these people, and I knew them when I worked in the government. I think had they—they now lament A) that they thought that Putin was going to be safe for their own economic interests. It turns out that he wasn’t. And B), maybe, had we tried a little harder to stop him in those early years, we might’ve had more success. But by the time they tried to stop him it was too late.
But then you already echoed that when he came back, there was a period of a little bit of freedom. I don’t wanna overstate it. Russia was still an autocracy, but it was a softer autocracy than it is today. It was in that Medvedev era. And that’s when you had, you know, organizations like TV Dozhd, TV Rain, I think was founded around that time. That’s when [Alexei] Navalny’s anti-corruption organization was founded.
And it was a more free time. You were part of it, Garry. You were living it, and you can tell people better than I can. But after Putin came back a second time, he gradually and then dramatically began to shut it all down. With, you know, arresting people that were protesting—most famously May 6, 2012, calling NGOs “foreign agents” and using that as a blunt tool to shut down their funding. And then, you know, it gets even much worse after he launches his full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Kasparov: Mike, but to be fair, the attack on the Republic of Georgia in 2008 technically happened under Medvedev. So that’s why I believe Putin never lost control. And so he was the power behind the throne.
McFaul: Absolutely. You’re right about that.
Kasparov: All these tragic episodes of modern Russian history: They bring us to the recent news of the attacks on free speech coming from Donald Trump and his advisers here in the United States after the Charlie Kirk assassination. And I’d like to go through a couple of things that have happened and to contextualize them in terms of your experience dealing with Russia. So one is promises of new scrutiny for nonprofit groups that support certain political causes. We know what kind of causes. Then next, the attorney general’s warning that she and the DOJ [Department of Justice] would prosecute hate speech. And one more just to add to the collection: the threat to revoke the broadcast licenses of television stations that carry messages the president doesn’t approve of. For me those were frightening parallels with what’s happened in Russia.
But many Americans believe that America, it’s not Russia. America has long-standing democratic traditions. There is an American constitution. And it’s an exaggeration even to bring Russia in this context. Do you think so? Or do you believe, as I do, that the threat to American democracy is existential?
McFaul: Well, I think the threat is real. We shouldn’t underestimate it. That list that you just ticked off are frightening things. And of course, we could add to that list in other dimensions.
Kasparov: Oh, absolutely. I just, you know, just don’t have time—
McFaul: Yes, headlines. And I think, not only Russia, but other places that had drifted from democracy to autocracy—it can be this kind of salami tactics, right? Bit by bit by bit. And then you wake up one day, and the most important element of a minimal democracy—free and fair elections—are no longer available. And we haven’t got there yet, but let’s talk about that. We’re creeping toward that.
So I think it’s very serious. Most certainly the most serious challenge to democracy in my lifetime. And having studied democracy around the world—and colleagues here at Stanford, we have a big group that works on democracy here—I think most of my colleagues who are real experts on global democracy think this is the greatest threat since the Civil War. That’s how grave it is. That’s the bad news.
Second, to add to more bad news, it just is becoming increasingly clear to me that the president doesn’t think in terms of democracy and autocracy. I do. That’s the title of my new book, by the way, Autocrats vs. Democrats. He doesn’t use that analytic framework to think about global politics; most certainly that’s obvious. But I don’t even think he thinks about that in American terms. He thinks about “us and them”: us versus our enemies, right? And whether they’re democrats or autocrats, it’s immaterial.
So he’s not afraid to use the power that he has against his enemies. So he is not himself—he doesn’t seem to have these democratic norms embedded in him. I don’t know about the people around him, but I don’t see a lot of people pushing back.
And the Constitution—this is a point you made last week, which I agree completely with—it’s just a piece of paper unless there are groups and people that actually try to enforce what’s written down there. And Russia, again, is another example of that. The Russian constitution became too super-presidential back in 1993 for my taste, but it wasn’t—the constitution was not an antidemocratic constitution when Putin took it over. He just used it in certain ways, and the piece of paper didn’t hold him back.
So what will preserve our democracy is not a piece of paper, and it doesn’t seem like it’ll be motivation from within the regime. It’ll be resistance from small-d democrats in American society. And I said that very specifically—small-d democrats—because I don’t see the fight for democracy as being a partisan issue. And in some ways I think that may be a tactical mistake here in our society, that we’re allowing it to be framed that way. And I was really, really pleasantly surprised to see Senator [Ted] Cruz, for instance, to denounce the removal of Jimmy Kimmel from the air. We need this to be a movement and a resistance for democracy, not for one political party or the other.
Kasparov: Now the title of your book that you mentioned, Autocrats vs. Democrats, is well suited to the podcast. I want us to ask you, because when I was younger and you were younger, the clear divide in the world between autocracy and democracy—it was between the Soviet Union and the United States and the respective blocs these countries led, right? What about today? I mean, the divide today is no longer geographic, right?
McFaul: Yeah. So I agree, but let me explain. There are many theorists here in the United States that think that regime type doesn’t matter. Ideology doesn’t matter; it’s just about power. John Mearsheimer is probably the most prominent theorist in academia that thinks that way. And my book is explicitly a rejection of that way of thinking about the world.
But when I went through the projects for autocratic export—looked really closely at both what Xi Jinping is doing and what Putin’s doing—I’ve got to tell you: I started in one place and ended in another. I started believing and animated by the hypothesis that the ideological threat from China was the biggest one of all, and that Russia was just kind of a sidekick. I ended reversing that. That dynamic and that ideological struggle is playing out in Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia. And by the way, we’re retreating from it now. I think this is a giant mistake by the Trump administration. That’s over there.
There’s another ideological struggle that’s autocrats versus democrats, but it’s—you know, I’m gonna oversimplify—but it’s illiberal nationalism, that Putin has been propagating for two decades now, versus liberal internationalism, or just democracy. You know, oversimplify.
And that is not just between states. That is within states. And I think—and I learned this from you, Garry, so I want to give you credit for that. Many years ago, you got me onto this threat from Russia, and I go through in the book all the instruments that Putin uses to propagate these ideas. And the harshest, of course, are his soldiers invading and sweeping lands and taking them over as he’s doing in eastern Ukraine right now. But it’s RT, it’s the church, it’s NGOs, it’s finding affinity with podcasters in America, where you see this weird world—that, again, you know better than I do—of the overlap of their illiberal nationalists with illiberal nationalists in Europe and the United States. And that struggle is happening within Hungary, within Slovakia, within Italy, within France, and within the United States. And I’m struck by how, you know, Putinism and Putin’s friends—how successful they’ve been. And I would say, tragically, that that illiberal autocratic project—it’s been very successful. I’ll just leave it at that, and we ignore it at our peril.
Kasparov: So it’s fair to say that Trump’s administration is pushing America toward autocracy?
McFaul: I think there are definitely certain elements of his policies that are antidemocratic. I’m still cautiously optimistic that we’re strong enough as a society, and we have deep, deep-enough values that go back hundreds of years. That’s something Russians didn’t have in the 1990s, as you know. But we have these strong traditions. There are these autocratic tendencies, and they are achieving some successes. There are pushbacks, and they are achieving some successes too, right? So I see this is a struggle now. It is a struggle for—and I really want to emphasize, I am not talking about Democrats versus Republicans. I’m talking about the struggle for democratic practices, democratic institutions, democratic values.
It’s a struggle now. I know that this is not the first time we’ve been through this. Obviously the worst was the Civil War, but we got through that too. But just because we did in the past doesn’t mean we will in the future. And so I should be careful about predicting the future.
Kasparov: Yeah. But now we have the president and his administration that are pushing an illiberal agenda. And we have to resist. So it’s—we are in agreement that this threat is real.
McFaul: Yes.
Kasparov: And election 2026—the midterm elections—could be the most fateful elections in our lifetime.
McFaul: Yes; I agree. And to underscore the point, you are absolutely right that you did not have the office of the president, was not the source of these antidemocratic tendencies. And right now, it’s all three major branches of government—they’re in alignment. The good news is that not all states are, and Trump, you know, he wants you to believe that he won a Ronald Reagan–type landslide election. But people should go and look at the maps from 1984 versus our last presidential election. He did not. I think the contingency of that election gives me hope. And again, I’m sounding, again, like I’m a partisan. I’m a pretty centrist guy, by the way. But in this moment, we need the checks and balances in our system to work. And that’s why the 2026 election is so important—that there might be at least one branch of government that is not beholden to the White House. Because I want to say one other thing that really makes my skin crawl, Garry, and it reminds me of living in Russia. I know, and you know, some of them were even, I would’ve called friends of mine 20 or 30 years ago. That when the tides turned and Putin was in control, they flipped, and they started supporting Putin. And then they went beyond that. They didn’t just support Putin. They started praising him and idealizing him and treating him—the way I remember, you know, propaganda when I lived in the Soviet Union would talk about [Leonid] Brezhnev. And that is strange to me, because I know they don’t believe it. There’s this “cult of a personality” thing that is also, you know, seeing Trump’s giant poster over one of the government buildings in D.C. the other day. Just for you and I, that reminds me of all those posters from the Soviet era.
Kasparov: But it’s not just about posters. I’m sure you know, you can name a few people, at least a few people—probably your former friends here in America—that now are just trying to excuse any of Trump’s illiberal actions.
McFaul: Yes.
Kasparov: That’s another parallel. So there are too many parallels. But overall, you remain optimistic. And I understand that your book—it ends on a hopeful note about the renewal of America. And I always like to end the episodes of this show with such a positive note. So just summarize, in the last minute, your belief in American democracy, in the strengths of this democracy, and the renewal of America—not only domestically, but internationally regaining its historic role of being, for people like myself, a beacon of hope.
McFaul: Well, on the domestic side, I’m nervous, like I’ve expressed. But I’m also cautiously optimistic, because I do think tens of millions of Americans believe in democracy. And the polling shows that. And I think we’re in a period of overreach for the president, and I think there’ll be a backlash against that. And I think in the long run we will have this renewal of American democracy, and that will be good for the markets. And that will be good for our power and the world as well.
And second, on the international stage, I’m also worried about isolationism, retrenchment, pulling back. But when I look at the long stretch of history, the arc of history is pointing toward more freedom. If you go back hundreds and hundreds of years, the evidence is just overwhelming. Then, finally, we got better ideas. Garry, our ideas are better than theirs. Most people around the world think it’s better to elect your leaders rather than have God or the Communist party or the military choose who should lead you. And the data on that is just overwhelming. So I think if we get back our confidence—we just had such a loss of confidence right now—we have more power, and we have better ideas. And in the long run, I’m quite optimistic even about the victory of democracy over autocracy in the world, as well as here at home.
Kasparov: Mike, thank you very much for this optimistic note. I think it’s very important, both for our audience and for the public at large to hear the reassurance from an expert of your caliber, who actually saw the rise of autocracy in Russia and is capable to calibrate the threat to democracy in America. Thank you very much for joining the show, Mike.
McFaul: Thanks for having me, Garry. It was a really great conversation.
[Music]
Kasparov: This episode of Autocracy in America was produced by Arlene Arevalo. Our editor is Dave Shaw. Original music and mix by Rob Smierciak. Fact-checking by Ena Alvarado. Special thanks to Polina Kasparova and Mig Greengard. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
I’m Garry Kasparov. I’ll be back here on Friday.
The post A Warning for Those Ready to Capitulate to Trump appeared first on The Atlantic.
