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 Gary Kaspar. 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 four-billionaire Russia policy and advising, but at one point, you know, you became the center man of the United States policy toward Russia as an ambassador in Moscow. Yeah. 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 at George Schultz's memoirs. George Schultz was the former Secretary of State in the Reagan era. 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 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. 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 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, Cari. Just so you know, and you actually sparked, 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. Now 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 Spassahaus. 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 Cari Kasparov, the people 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 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, 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 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, 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 believe that 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. No, I can't confirm that American participation in the protest, 2011 to 2012, was minimal. Yes. I can even add that those groups, those NGOs mentioned by Medvedev, that were funded by Americans, they were 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. Exactly. It's quite a paradox, but you describe what I saw. And by the way, I believe at that time was a mistake. of American goodwill, so you try. But Vladimir Putin's agenda to acknowledge was already quite clear. I mean, he was quite consistent in expanding Russian imperial influence. Yes. So what did go wrong? I mean, it's just at 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 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. To 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. And 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, 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, you know, 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, 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. 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 this season, George Friedman, made that very case. What do you think? Just, I'm hard pressed to think what that might be. I mean, maybe some extension of the start treaty 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 Kokam 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 drive back. Hi, I'm Van Nukeurk, senior editor at The Atlantic. When I publish a story, my hope is that it's illuminating enough that you want to share it with others. Because I know that when I read a great article, I want to give that experience to someone else. That's the spirit behind The Atlantic's new premium plus subscription, which includes unlimited access for you and three other people. Maybe they're family. Maybe they're friends. Whoever they are, you can now share all of our journalism with them for less than $4 a week. For a limited time, you'll also get the beautiful Atlantic scrapbook and a special tote bag. Subscribe to premium plus today at the Atlantic.com/plus. That's PLUS. The period when Putin was reelected and consolidated his power and rule. 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 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? So, when Putin first came in and he was an accidental president, he didn't have some great movement behind him, picked by some of these oligarchs as a way to stop another guy pre-muck off from becoming president, there's a mythology, including here in the United States, that there was this ground swell of support for Putin's style of illiberal nationalism. And this is not true. I mean, that's just not true. He was 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 to flee and later died mysteriously in London who controlled that Boris Berezovsky. But the real drama, as you'll remember, was about MTV, 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 in the United States. Eventually, one of the state owned enterprises, loyal to Putin, Gasprom. And it's branch called Gasprom Media, took over MTV. 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. It's just, you know, no big deal. And then two years later, one of the most famous satirical shows that called "Cookly" 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 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, you know, the equivalent of American states. And there are one more moment that was in this tracer that was really important, happened in 2003, when somebody you know, well, me, Karl Karski 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 trend lines with Putin and he tried to do some things about it. And he got arrested. And he spent another decade in jail. And his company has been first nationalized and then taken by one of the Putin's closest management. Right. Eager Setschen. 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 want to 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 they now lament a that they thought that Putin was going to be safe for their own economic interest. It turns out that he wasn't. And 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 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 Fera. And that's when you had, you know, organizations like TV Doge, TV Rain. I think was founded around that time. That's when Navalny's anti-corruption organization was founded. And 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, I think. a second time, he gradually and then dramatically began to shut it all down with 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 it gets even much worse after he launches his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. But to be fair, the attack on the Republic of Georgia in 2008 technically happened. Yes, good point. Yeah, under mid-vehsive. 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, they bring us to the recent news of their attacks on free speech coming from Dolom Trump and his advisors here in the United States after the Charlie Kirk assassination. Yes. 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 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 would prosecute hate speech and one more just to add for the collection, the threat to revoke the broadcast licenses of television stations that carry messages that President does the approval. For me, those were frightening parallels. What's happened in Russia? But many Americans believe that America was not Russia. It's not Russia. America has long standing democratic traditions. There is 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? 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 and other dimension. Oh, absolutely. I just just. Yeah. Headlines. Yes, headlines. And I think not only Russia but other places that are drifted from democracy to a talker see 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 towards 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 of 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 titled by 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 versus our enemies, right? Whether they're Democrats or autocrats, it's immaterial. 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. 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 Russia again, as 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 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 will 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 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 this to be a movement and a resistance for democracy, not for one political party or the other. The title of your book that mentioned autocrat versus democratic as well suited to the podcast. And I wanted to ask you because 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 this country's led. What about today? I mean, divide today is no longer geographic. Right. 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 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 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 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 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, Gary, 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, is soldiers invading and, you know, 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, you know, podcasters in America where you see this 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. So it's fair to say that Trump's administration is pushing America towards autocracy. I think there are definitely certain elements of his policies that are anti-democratic. And I'm still cautiously optimistic that we're strong enough as a society and we have deep, deeper 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 as 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. No, 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 pro. president and his administration that are pushing in liberal agenda. Yes. And we have to resist. So it's, we are agreement that the threat is real. Yes. And election 2026, the midterm elections could be the most faithful elections in our lifetime. Yes. I agree. And by underscoring 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 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 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, 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 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. There's this cult of a personality thing that is also seeing Trump's giant poster over the one of the government buildings in DC the other day. That reminds me of all those posters from the Soviet era. But it's not just about posters. I'm sure you can name few people, at least few people, probably your former friends here in America that now are just trying to excuse any of Trump's liberal actions. Yes. That's another parallel. So that too many parallels. And overall, you mean optimistic and understand that your book ends on a hopeful note about the renewal of America. And I always like to end the episodes of the show with such a positive note. So just summarize just in the last minute. So your belief in American democracy, in the strengths of this democracy and the renewal of America not only domestically but internationally. I think it's a historic role of being for people like myself, a beacon of hope. 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 in 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 towards more freedom. We 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. 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 our ocracy in the world as well as here at home. Mike, thank you very much for this optimistic note. I think it's very important to those 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 a really great conversation. This episode of Autocracy in America was produced by Arlene O'Revallo, our editor is Dave Shaw, original music and mix Baroque smirce app, fact-checking by Inal Varada, special thanks to the people in the Casparo and Migringle. Claudio Nebe is executive producer of Atlantic Audio. And I'm Gary Casparo. I'll be back on Friday. When I publish a story, my hope is that it's illuminating enough that you'll want to share it with others. That's PLUS.