Michael McFaul on Russia
Jason Zengerle links to a worthwhile realist take on Russia from Stepehn Boykewich that, inter alia, engages in the sort of more-sympathetic-than-you-usually-hear-in-the-American-media reading of Vladimir Putin’s rise to power that you’ll often hear from, for example, me. Zengerle says:
Whether Boykewich is right, I can’t really say. But I think it’s an important view to consider–especially in light of Obama’s recent appointment of Stanford’s Michael McFaul (who’s something of a hardliner) as the National Security Council’s top Russia hand.
Someone was asking me to characterize McFaul’s views a couple of weeks ago and likewise was coming from the default assumption that he’s a hardliner of whom I would disapprove. I think I said in response that that’s definitely his reputation, but I’m not sure it’s really correct. Or, rather, I think it tends to illustrate some of the artificiality of some of the foreign policy line-drawing. McFaul has a strong scholarly and policy interest in democracy promotion. And you never see him cosigning realist manifestos. And you sometimes do see him cosigning these kind of manifestos. That said, with regard to both democracy promotion in general and Russia in particular, McFaul’s a bona fide expert who really knows what he’s talking about, not a bullshitter who thinks it’s good to “be tough” or whatever. Consequently, he has, I think, a very measured and reasonable take on these things. I’d be hard-pressed to disagree with anything in his article on “Should Democracy Be Promoted or Demoted?” co-written with Francis Fukuyama.
Or take his long fall 2005 article with James Goldgeier on “What To Do About Russia”. I would say it takes more of a hostile tone about Putin than I would, but that the difference of opinion is really a disagreement about how we should understand Boris Yeltsin and the merry band of thieves who preceded Putin, rather than a disagreement about Putin. And the policy prescriptions are, again, measured and sensible. Indeed, the main policy argument is that we need to engage with the Russian government on an essentially realpolitik basis regarding nuclear proliferation and counterterrorism issues. They also argue that Russian conduct in Chechnya is harming U.S. interests in the broader fight against al-Qaeda, which I think is correct, but which relies on a basically realist assessment of the al-Qaeda issue. On the democracy front, they call for “[d]irect personal engagement with Russian democratic activists” in which we emulate Ronald Reagan who “accorded [] human rights activists the same respect that he showed for his Soviet counterpart” and for about $100 million in FREEDOM Support Act funds for Russian civil society programs.
On the whole, this is a modest, realistic, and somewhat realist agenda. And I think that reflects the fact that people who understand what they’re talking about understand that the world isn’t crowded with extremely sharp trade-offs between democratic and humanitarian ideals and American interests. Real hard-liners are people who just don’t want to cooperate with Russia at all, and who use the brutality of the Putin regime as a pretext for a highly confrontational security agenda on nuclear weapons, missile defense, and all the rest. But the people who want those things wanted them when Yeltsin was in power and would want them under any conceivable Russian regime, just as any Russian government would oppose them. If you genuinely interested in Russian democracy, you don’t crowd the US-Russian bilateral relationship with counterproductive hostility. And if you’re genuinely interested in U.S.-Russian cooperation, I think you do need to want us to try to find ways to exercise influence at the margin to push Russia back on a democratic path—cooperation could be deeper and easier with a more liberal, more democratic government in Moscow.
16 Responses to “Michael McFaul on Russia”
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February 23rd, 2009 at 3:53 pm
And if you’re genuinely interested in U.S.-Russian cooperation, I think you do need to want us to try to find ways to exercise influence at the margin to push Russia back on a democratic path—cooperation could be deeper and easier with a more liberal, more democratic government in Moscow.
How about getting a more liberal, more democratic government in DC first? Maybe Europeans should even try to exercise influence at the margin to push the US back on a law-abiding, non-torturing path.
February 23rd, 2009 at 4:04 pm
OT: I’ve been agnostic about (rather than opposed to) the Dennis Ross appointment because I thought it offered an opening for certain political opportunities.
Given how it’s looking like Ross is serving as Chas Freeman’s beard, I’m now thinking my original instincts were correct.
February 23rd, 2009 at 4:22 pm
I thought the real issue with McFaul was is war on The eXile and Matt Taibbi.
February 23rd, 2009 at 4:32 pm
I hate the term realist.
It’s an excellent way to sneak in unwarranted assumptions as normalized.
February 23rd, 2009 at 4:35 pm
I remember something a student told me in Moscow in 2001: After Yeltsin, they were happy just to have a leader who wasn’t in the hospital constantly and showed up to work each day sober.
February 23rd, 2009 at 5:14 pm
Matt, I’d take this more seriously coming from you if I didn’t think you were basically a bull-shitter on Russia yourself, as you don’t seem to actually know anything about the place, less than regularly reading a lot of news articles would make most people know. I know you spent a few weeks there, but really, that doesn’t give you any special insight and you’re pretty sloppy. If you were not, you’d know, for example, that the Putin group is as big a group of thieves as the Yeltsin group is, if not more so, and that corruption has increased under Putin, and that the improvements in life there have had basically nothing to do w/ Putin, as current events are showing. But you never seem to see this. It’s because you know crap about Russia. You’d be better off not posting anything about it.
February 23rd, 2009 at 5:49 pm
Matt(not the famous one) – you literally beat me to it. As you have obviously noticed, this post doesn’t actually say anything on any substantive matter. It has a bunch of links, which is nice. But it can easily be summarized as saying we should defer to the Kremlin more. It implies ignorance on the part of Russia hawks but demonstrates no actual knowledge about the country or regime. At the risk of sounding unserious, Putin is a scary motherfucker and the Russians in power do not have good intentions. Sure, we can and should work with them on issues where we have mutual interests. But if you have a conversation with an actual Russian, whether on the street or in the government, you will quickly realize that this is a country that shares few of our assumptions about democracy, liberalism, rule of law or anything for that matter. Again, we can and should work with them. But what Matt calls a highly confrontational security policy is simply a policy that does not give the benefit of the doubt to a regime that has never demonstrated it should be trusted.
February 23rd, 2009 at 6:25 pm
I think the hard-liners on Russia seem to be stuck in the bipolar-confrontational global paradigm of the Cold War. Part of the reason why American-Russian relations soured in the Bush years is that W’s foreign policy people were all Soviet experts like Condi who, although their scholarship on the USSR may have been of a high caliber, were blinkered by the limit of their expertise to a paradigm of international relations that no longer applied. This narrow view not only hampered the administration’s bargaining strategies when it came to Russia, it also informed the ideological and tactical forms of the War on Terror. The Bush team’s preference for coercion over reciprocity in its dealings with Putin only encouraged the latter to assume a more defensive posture and to form alliances with countries like Iran and Venezuela whose governments are ideologically fueled by anti-Americanism generally and anti-Bushism in particular. A Russia policy of isolation and encirclement is not compatible with the contemporary geopolitical playing field, and we have seen this policy (in striking similarity to other, similar policies) exacerbate the hostility and corruption of the very regime it was meant to moderate.
A more reciprocal bargaining strategy (one furthermore based on strategic interests rather than ideology) when it comes to US-Russian relations is unlikely to mollify the zealous crusaders of democracy and civil rights, but ultimately has a better chance of achieving their goals in the long run. Our Russia policy should look like the China policy that Hillary Clinton has been framing: treat Russia like the still-relevant, still-influential world power that it is, and negotiate cooperatively based on mutual interests on issues like energy security, terrorism, and nukes. As in the Chinese case, more delicate, ideological issues regarding democratic institutions, human rights, and spheres of influence can only hope to be addressed diplomatically in the wake of a rapprochement between the US and Russia based on strategic cooperation.
February 23rd, 2009 at 7:15 pm
Re: But if you have a conversation with an actual Russian, whether on the street or in the government, you will quickly realize that this is a country that shares few of our assumptions about democracy, liberalism, rule of law or anything for that matter.
I’m not sure why they should. Our ideas about “liberal democracy” are fundamentally alien to the Russian national character, and can at best be foreign impositions. That said, I think that American ideas about “liberal democracy” are fundamentally based on false premises, so I don’t think it’s a bad thing that Russians are smart enough to see through them. Russia will only ever thrive under an authoritarian regime of one flavor or another. My hope is that such a regime will be of a Christian, agrarian, cooperative-socialist, peasant-oriented flavor rather than some other flavor.
February 23rd, 2009 at 10:27 pm
Russia will only ever thrive under an authoritarian regime of one flavor or another. My hope is that such a regime will be of a Christian, agrarian, cooperative-socialist, peasant-oriented flavor
Of course, Hector thinks much the same thing about the United States . . .
February 23rd, 2009 at 11:28 pm
Rea,
No, actually. I think that, yes, my ideal utopian society would be a moderately authoritarian, Christian, austere, agrarian, socialist commonwealth of peasant cooperatives. But as there is no chance of that happening in America, and as it would be as foreign to American culture as liberal “democracy” is to Russia (more’s the pity) I do not support said utopian dream as a practical political project in America. I do applaud when countries like Venezuela or Russia advance towards it, but I don’t necessarily want the U.S. to become either Venezuela or Russia.
February 24th, 2009 at 12:10 am
“My hope is that such a regime will be of a Christian, agrarian, cooperative-socialist, peasant-oriented flavor rather than some other flavor.”
Hector may or may not realize that the per-capita GDP of that proposed polity will run about $2,000-$5,000. Nobody can produce that level of GDP and survive as a political leader in relative proximity to economies producing per capita GDPs of $30,000-40,000.
February 24th, 2009 at 8:03 am
Russia will only ever thrive under an authoritarian regime of one flavor or another. My hope is that such a regime will be of a Christian, agrarian, cooperative-socialist, peasant-oriented flavor
Sounds a lot like the National Revolution of Vichy France – the last major state to believe that prosperity lay in agrarianism.
February 24th, 2009 at 11:06 am
Christian, agrarian, cooperative-socialist, peasant-oriented flavor
Tolstoyism.
February 24th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
An Outhouse,
Well, not exactly, but I do have a good deal of respect for Tolstoy.
Michael S.,
How tiresome, and how predictable. Hipster liberals respond to anything they don’t like by associating it with the Nazis (or in this case, with a Nazi collaborationist regime). Grow up. For what it’s worth, today’s Venezuelan government is infused with strongly agrarianist ideology (see the talk about “sowing the oil”, the rhetoric about emptying the shantytowns and converting shantytown dwellers into strong, hardworking, collectivist peasants, the heavy investment in agriculture, etc.) You may or may not like the Chávez regime, but they assuredly aren’t a Vichy clone.
February 24th, 2009 at 7:41 pm
Hector -
I didn’t associate anything with the Nazis – I merely pointed out that your professed philosophy bears a parallel to that of the Vichy “National Revolution”. Since you can’t do anything to change that, you might as well wear it with pride.