The Warning

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 are 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 emerge, we are seeing the proclamation of a one-party system and perhaps most troubling, we are seeing Donald Trump and those around him picked 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 bring you a special episode today. From the Atlantic, this is Autocracy in America. I'm Geryka Spar. My guest today is Michael McFall, the US ambassador to Russia in the years following Putin's return to the President's side. He saw theocracy take hold before his eyes and he has a warning for those in America who seem ready to capitulate to the Trump administration. 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 you know fluently. But we should have this conversation in English. Yes of course. Well thanks for having me, Gary. 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. Great to be with you though. Okay very good. One of the early guests in the show was Jake Sullivan and I asked him about American foreign policy towards Russia just to cover the 25 years since appearance of Vladimir Putin as the top man in Russia or you can go even back to 1991. Something did go wrong. Ever and quickly can you summarize it before we start talking about your own experience there? So when the Soviet Union collapsed and that was a euphoric moment for me personally, there was a bat 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 bat that I think Democrats and Republicans made together. I think it was the right bat by the way with one big mistake. We should have had a hedge to that bat. 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. Okay. So you have been actively engaged in formulating Russia policy and advising but at one point you know you became the center man of the United States policy of Russia as an ambassador in Moscow. So you arrived in Russia in 2012 as the architect of the Obama administration effort to engage with Russia so called the reset policy. By the way is it fair to call you the architect of it? I don't know. That's a gromp cascassano. That's overstate Ventinra I would say but I most certainly was part of that process for sure because I was working at the White House at the time. So now to tell us about your experience in Russia. Well let me start a few years earlier with the origins of the Obama administration and our approach towards Russia. So we had this approach that I took right out of George Schultz's memoirs. George Schultz was the former Secretary of State in the Reagan era and I think it's chapter 27 where he talks about re-engaging the Soviets and this is years before 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 Schultz said no we got to talk to them about like arms control and nuclear stuff but we're going to do that without one checking our values at the door and without two throwing other countries under the bus. 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 treaty. The old one was expiring in 2009 we thought it was an America's national interest to do a new one and we did and we reduced by 30% the number of nuclear weapons in the world. And I want to be clear it wasn't holding hands and singing Kumbaya with Medvedev for Putin these were really concrete things. But we had this other strategy that was very controversial in our own government carry just so you know and you actually sparked you I don't know if you know this I'm going to tell you now you actually sparked this debate because we had this idea of dual track diplomacy that we're going to engage with the government but we're also going to 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 Spassahouse 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 invite Gary Kasparov the people in the in the Kremlin will be upset about it but I prevailed and I just tell that then yet 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 a business 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 and Gary 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 a big news it wasn't oh my goodness you know Obama's a 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 you know it was 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 said a signal this is what he said to protest against our regime and he was obviously just you know 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 and portrayed as you know somebody sent to Moscow to foment revolution against Putin and I want to be crystal clear I that was not my assignment and if it was we would have messed it up anyway right we're not very good at that but there's no doubt that whether they believes it or not Putin adopted an extremely hostile position towards 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 going to 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 I can confirm that American participation in the protest 2011-2012 was minimal yes I can you get at that those groups those NGOs mentioned by Medvedev that were funded by Americans they were least radical as a matter of fact you know the the rule 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 exactly it's quite a paradox but you describe what I saw and by the way believe at that time was a mistake a lot of American goodwill so you try yeah but Vladimir Putin's agenda to my knowledge was already quite clear I mean he was quite consistent in in expanding Russian imperial influence yes so what did go wrong I mean it's this but what point you and again I say you Americans recognize that this policy was a failure well let me tell you about me personally and then the Obama administration and later the Biden administration will 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 anti-democratic agenda to me and people can go look it up so you don't think I'm just making this up post facto I wrote my first anti-Pooten peace 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 23rd or 24th 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 you know we're not going to be able to work with this guy at all and he you know 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 protests 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 I 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 you know 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 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 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 the end of the Obama administration was 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 or already seasoned George Friedman made that very case what do you think just I'm hard pressed to think with them I be I mean maybe some extension of the start tree that's going to expire next year that could be one area but can you trust Putin well my general strategy and thinking is no and we have to go back to you know a modernized version of containment including economic containment just like we had this thing called KhoKa during the Cold War we need that in place as a way to contain the pernicious elements of in interaction with Russian elites including Russian companies today we'll drag back so you were in Moscow and the period when Putin was reelected and consolidated his power and rule yes so last week you wrote that many Russian oligars didn't resist Putin's early autocratic moves because he offered them some kind of deals he cut the taxes right and then years later they regretted their passivity when they had the power to resist yeah can it be just more specific describe more about that 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 pre-mic off from becoming president there's a mythology including here in the United States that there was this ground swell of support for you know Putin style of illiberal nationalism and that's just this is not true I mean that's just not true he's picked by 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 of 13% 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 defle 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 Gugusinski was his name and they did a couple of things first of all and this is the echoes of the moment we're in the United States eventually one of the state owned enterprises loyal to Putin gas prom and it's it's branch called gas prom media took over ntv and it was all always 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 that called Cookely puppets was taken off the air and that's the echo of the moment we're in now then and these are not I want to be careful you know the history rhymes but it's not exactly the same and I don't want 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 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 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 you know the equivalent of American states and there are one more moment that was in this this traca that was really important happened in 2003 when somebody you know well me kala kartakowski 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 you know owning a state owned enterprise I'd get garbled in American media sometimes but he also began to see the 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 at his company has been first nationalized and then taken by one of the Putin's closest management right eager session and you put those three things together that's when you know this notion that he's going to cut our taxes and everything's going to be okay that's when those people and I don't I don't want to over-emphasize how well I knew them but I knew some of these people and I knew them when I worked in the government I think they they now lament a that they this they thought that Putin was going to be safe for their their own economic interests it turns out that he wasn't and be you know maybe had we tried a little harder to stop him in those early years we might have 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 of a of a little bit of freedom I don't want to emphasize I don't want to overstate it Russia was still in autocracy but it was a softer autocracy than it was today it was in that mid-Vieta phara and that's when you had you know organizations like TV doge TV rain I think was founded around that time that's when the Volneys anti-corruption organization was founded and it was a you know it was a more free time you were part of it Gary 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 for an 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 Mike but to be fair so the attack on the Republic of Georgia in 2008 technically happened Yes good point yeah under mid-Vieta so that's why I believe Putin never lost control and so he was the power behind the throne absolutely you're right about that all these tragic episodes of modern Russia history yeah they bring us to the recent news of their attacks on free speech coming from Donald Trump and his advisors here in the United States after the Charlie Kirk assassination yes 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 this promises of news scrutiny for non-profit groups that support certain political causes we know what kind of causes then next study according to generals warning that she and the DOJ would prosecute hate speech and one more just too add for the collection the threat to revoke the broadcast licenses of television stations that carry messages the president does the proof of for me those were frightening parallels what's what's happened in Russia but many Americans believe that America was not Russia it's not Russia America has long you know standing democratic traditions there is American Constitution and it's it's an exaggeration even to bring Russia in this context do you think so or you believe as as as I do that the threat to American democracy is existential well I think the threat is real we shouldn't underestimate it that list that you just ticked off are frightening things and and of course we could add to that list and other dimension oh absolutely I just you know just yeah headlines yes headlines and and I think you know not only Russia but other places that are drifted from democracy to a tock receipt it can be this kind of salami tactics right bit by bit and then you wake up one day and the 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 we're creeping towards that so I think it's very serious it most certainly the most serious challenge to democracy in my lifetime and you know 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 of on global democracy think this is the greatest threat since the silver 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 you know I do you know that's titled my new book by the way autocrats versus 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 the versus our enemies right and and whether they're Democrats or autocrats it's in material so he's not afraid to use the power he had 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 and the constitution this is a point you made that last week which I agree up 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 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 anti-democratic constitution when Putin took it over he just used it in certain ways and 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 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 Cruz for instance to denounce the removal of Jimmy Kimmel from the heirs we need we need this to be a movement and a resistance for democracy not for one political party or the other now the title of your book that mentioned autoclusterosu Democrats as well suited to the podcast and I want us to to ask you and because when when I was younger and you were younger the clear divide in the world between autocracy and democracy was between the Soviet Union and the United States and the respective blocks these countries led right what about today I mean divide today's no longer geographic right 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 Mershheimer's 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 the projects for autocratic export and looked really closely at both what Xi Jinping is doing and what Putin's doing I 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 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 going to oversimplify but it's illiberal nationalism that Putin has been propagating for for two decades now versus liberal internationalism or just democracy you know well oversimplify and that is not just between states that is within states and I think and I learned this from you Gary so I want to give you credit for that many years ago you got me on to 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 you know sweeping lands and 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 you know podcasters in America where you see this this weird world that again you know better than I do of the overlap of of their illiberal nationalist with illiberal nationalist in Europe and the United States and that struggle is happening within hungry with inslovakia 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 and I I would say tragically that that illiberal autocratic project it's been very successful I'll just leave it at that and we we ignored it at our peril so it's fair to say that Trump's administration is pushing America towards aocracy I think there are definitely certain elements of his policies that are anti-democratic and I'm still cautiously optimistic that we're strong as a society and we have deep deep enough values that they go back hundreds of years that's something Russians didn't have in the 1990s as you know what we have these strong traditions there are these autocratic tendencies and they are they are achieving some successes there are pushbacks and they are achieving some successes too right so I see this this is a struggle now it is a struggle for the 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 yeah but now we have the president and his administration that um are pushing uh in liberal agenda yes and we have to resist so it's we are agreement that the threat is real yes and uh election 2026 the midterm elections could be the most faithful elections in our lifetime yes I agree and but to underscore the point you also said just that you are absolutely right that you did not have the office of the president with not the source of these anti-democratic tendencies and right now it's all three major branches of government are their 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 you know I'm sounding again like I'm a partisan I'm a pretty centrist guy by the way but 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 Gary and it reminds me of living in Russia I know and you know some of them were even I would have called friends of mine 20 or 30 years ago that when the tides turned and Putin was in control uh 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 Brezhnav and that is strange to me because I know they don't believe it um you know there's this cult of a personality thing that is also you know seeing seeing Trump's giant poster over the one of the government buildings in DC the other day just for you and I that that reminds me of all those posters from the Soviet era but it's not but it's not just about posters I'm sure you know you can name few people at least few people uh probably your former friends here in America that now are just trying to excuse any of Trump's illiberal actions yes that's another parallel so that that too many parallels but overall you remain optimistic and understand that your bookets ends on a hopeful note about the renewal of America and uh and I always like to end the episodes of the show with such a positive note so just summarize just you know in the last minute so uh your belief in American democracy in the strengths of this democracy and uh and the renewal of America not only domestically but internationally regaining uh it's um historic growl of uh being for people like myself a beacon of hope well on the domestic side I'm nervous like I have expressed but I'm also cautiously optimistic because I do think tens of millions of Americans believe in democracy uh and the polling shows that and and I think we're in a period of overreach uh 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 in the world as well and second on the on the international stage I'm also worried about isolationism uh retrenchment pulling back uh but when I look at the long stretch of history uh the arc of history is pointing towards more freedom if you go back hundreds and hundreds of years the evidence is just overwhelming and then finally we got better ideas Gary our ideas are better than theirs uh most people around the world think it's better to elect your leaders rather than have god or the communist party or the military uh 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 uh we have more power and we have better ideas uh and in the long run uh I'm quite optimistic even about the the victory of democracy over atocracy in the world as well as here at home uh Mike thank you very much for this optimistic note uh I think it's very important uh uh 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 caliber the threat to democracy in America thank you very much for joining the show Mike thanks for having me Gary it was really great conversation this episode of autocracy in America was produced by Arlene O'Revallah our editor is Dave Shaw original music and mix Baroque smirciac fact checking by Inna Alvarada special thanks to Polina Kasparov and Mick Gringo Claude Nde Bay is executive producer of Atlantic audio Andreav Waldis is our manager editor I'm Yarek Kasparov I'll be back on Friday