Unquiet American

STANFORD, California — “I wish him well,” tweeted Michael McFaul, on the day Jon Huntsman was offered the delicate job of ambassador to Russia from the United States.

It’s the job McFaul held from January 2012 to February 2014, when he resigned after 24 months of the most unrelenting workplace stress. It’s unlikely that Moscow will treat Huntsman — Donald Trump’s man — as inhospitably as it treated McFaul, whose outspokenness on democracy so riled the Kremlin that he became the object of its crudest ire.

McFaul retreated from bare-knuckle Moscow to the calm of Stanford University, where he’d taught before he left for the Obama State Department in 2009 — and where the only threats to a man’s well-being are students on bicycles. He’s now director of Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and he’s agreed to meet me at his modest office for a chat in between TV appearances.

The Russia-U.S. story, McFaul says, “has never been more important in the last 25 years than it is now.” But unlike the time when the Soviet Union was collapsing, “there’s no optimism.” America was buoyant back then, about the idea that Russia “could build democratic institutions and capitalism as home, and would integrate with the West. For a quarter of a century, Democrats and Republicans in the White House were committed to that objective.”

There were “hiccups along the way,” McFaul concedes, “but people were still committed to the cause. Today, for me, that project is over.”

Vladimir Putin has snuffed out all hope.

 * * *

Putin looms large in McFaul’s own story, and there are times when his connection to the Russian leader seems deeply personal. McFaul, I suggest, was the Unquiet American in his time in Moscow, an almost undiplomatic ambassador.

He demurs. “I think most people think of me as being a public figure and on Twitter — and that was part of my job. But another part was marching over to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs every day and doing the business of our diplomacy … mostly damage control, because we were already in a confrontational period before I arrived in Moscow.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan | Igor Kovalenko/EPA

Putin was running for reelection when McFaul landed in Moscow, and there had been massive demonstrations against him. “Hundreds of thousands of people were protesting, the first time since the Soviet Union collapsed. And that’s when I arrived.”

A very senior Kremlin official who had known McFaul for decades told him, “‘Mike, your arrival right at this moment is like manna from heaven for our campaign.’ I’d written about democratization, and advocated for it, so I was the perfect poster-child for their anti-American rhetoric. I’d been sent by Obama, they said, to foment revolution against Putin.”

How did it feel, I ask, to help Putin win the election — to have been co-opted as part of Putin’s winning strategy? “I don’t think I won it,” he responds. “But they certainly thought that their anti-American campaign added significant percentage points to his vote tally in March [2012].”

McFaul accepts that he pushed the limits, in Moscow, of what diplomats do. “About democracy, yes, I did,” he says, and adds that he was instructed to do so by the administration. “As somebody who’s never served as a diplomat, am I going to parachute into Moscow and start my own rogue operation? I’m not that stupid. I played firmly within the parameters of our policy.”

“They had an aggressive campaign to rattle me, to harass me, to follow me and my family around” — Michael McFaul

“Now let’s be clear,” he continues. “I’m also one of the guys that set up the policy back in 2009, and a firm part of it was that we should engage with the state and society.

“What changed? Our policy didn’t. What changed, of course, were the demonstrations and the anxiety in the Kremlin about the stability of their regime. And I couldn’t do anything about that.”

 * * *

McFaul couldn’t, also, do anything about the constant hounding that followed his very public engagement with Russian civil society. “They had an aggressive campaign to rattle me, to harass me, to follow me and my family around,” he says. “I endured two years of this. The spike in harassment during my period there was dramatic.

“Old hands in the embassy would say, ‘This is new. This is way beyond anything from the Soviet times.’ The people working there are heroes serving their country, because they’re dealing with a level of harassment that nobody should have to.”

I mention an incident from March 2012, one that marked him out as an enemy in nationalist Russian eyes. McFaul was going to see a civil society leader, and details of the meeting didn’t stay private for long. “Every phone call I made was being recorded,” McFaul recalls, “and a circus was waiting for me, TV crews, Cossacks with hats and swords, right-wing youth.” He was surrounded, and they got under his skin — on camera. “I regret that,” he says.

Although McFaul speaks Russian, and speaks it well enough to have complex conversations with people, he doesn’t — by his own confession — get every nuance right. “That day, what I wanted to say to the mob was, ‘This is crazy. This is uncouth behavior.’ But what I said instead was, ‘This is a wild country.’ And they’ve never let me forget it.”

 * * *

Is Ukraine lost to the West? Are Donbass and Crimea gone forever?

The question animates him. “I think Ukraine has a bright future as a country. I’m actually quite optimistic about Ukraine. I don’t want to predict what happens in the East. I’m not sure I’d agree that it’s gone, but I’m not optimistic that there’s a resolution there.

“The unintended positive consequence of that horrible annexation and intervention is that it’s been the birth of Ukrainian society, and of a Ukrainian nation and identity.”

Despite troubles at the top — where there are people from the old system still in charge — McFaul sees a vibrant civil society, and an affinity with Europe now that was ambiguous before. “It’s been the birth of a nation,” he says. “Putin did that inadvertently.”

“I think he’ll stay in power for as long as he can” — McFaul on Putin

What is the worst thing Trump could possibly do in the Russia sphere? “In my mind,” says McFaul, “that would be to recognize Crimea as part of Russia. That would undermine everything that we built after World War II. At the top of the list of the liberal international order is, ‘Thou shalt not annex territory of thy neighbor.’ That scares me.”

He is “cautiously optimistic” that Trump is moving away from such a step, and adds that the president’s Russia policy “is beginning to look a lot like Obama’s.”

“For all the promises during the presidential campaign, if you look at what has been said about NATO, about Crimea, and the sanctions, it’s not looking so different, really,” he says.

How does the Putin era end? “When Putin is no longer in power,” responds McFaul. “And I think he’ll stay in power for as long as he can.”

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, center, receives the diplomatic credentials of then-U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul in 2012 | Pool photo by Ekaterina Shtukina/EPA

A natural end to Putin’s presidency is “unlikely,” he says, “given the kind of system he’s built around himself, that really relies on one charismatic individual at its core.”

The Russians don’t have anything like the Chinese Communist Party, and they “most certainly don’t have a set of ideas that are somehow independent of Putin that could be easily taken up by somebody in his ideological camp.”

So Putin’s never going to cede power and retire quietly to his dacha?

“I would not guess so,” says McFaul.

Tunku Varadarajan, a contributing editor at POLITICO, is the Virginia Hobbs Carpenter Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.