- It's easy to look at the world and grow concerned that the advantages autocracies like Russia and China have over democracies like the United States are insurmountable.

But today's guest argues that it's just the opposite, that it's the very messiness of American democracy that is the source of our greatest strength.

He's Michael McFaul.

This week on "Story in the Public Square."

(bright music) (bright music continues) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University, and my guest this week is an accomplished diplomat, public servant, and scholar.

Michael McFaul served as US Ambassador to the Russian Federation in the Obama administration and is now director at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.

He's also the author of a timely new book, "Autocrats vs.

Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder."

Mike, it's great to be with you today.

- Thanks for having me.

Really appreciate it.

- So the book, "Autocrats vs.

Democrats," is just a tremendous read.

It's part history, it's part analysis, and it's part prescription about where we need to be going as a country.

Why did you write it?

- Well, it took me a long time, Jim, to write this book.

I worked on it for several years.

So the motivations changed over the years.

Initially, when I did the initial research living in China in the summer of 2015, you know, back then, we had a debate about whether economic modernization would lead to political liberalization, and I didn't see that trend in Eastern Europe.

I wrote a book actually in 1992 showing that it didn't lead to evolutionary change.

There was this revolutionary change.

And I wanted to see if it would work for China, and that was the first motivation.

That debate has now long since passed because it has not led to democratization, obviously, in China today.

The second motivation then came about around the time that President Trump won his first term and his team drafted a new national security strategy, I think a very influential one, that called out Russia and China as revisionist powers in the international system.

And I agreed generally with that hypothesis, but then there became a very popular, both talking about Russia and China, is this a new Cold War?

And I wanted to test that hypothesis looking at the old Cold War.

And my conclusion is that some things are similar and some things are different, and that if we just look at the similarities, we're gonna make mistakes in our analysis.

But then the third motivation was always to try to make an argument for why we should, we being the United States of America, should remain engaged in the world rather than moving towards isolationism, why I think we're better off to engage with the world, with allies and in multilateral organizations, rather than going it alone, and why we should support ideas of democracy and human rights, freedom and liberty, rather than just thinking about balance of power politics.

That was always a motivation of the book, but it became even more important to me after the second election of President Trump because President Trump, although he's a little bit all over the place these days, but generally speaking, he's more isolationist than I am, he's more of a go it alone president than I am, and he doesn't really focus much on promoting democracy abroad, whereas I believe that's in America's national interest.

So, ironically, or tragically, one of the two, because of his reelection, the prescriptive part of the book may be the most important part of the book.

- Well, we're gonna get to some of those prescriptions in a bit, but let's start with some of that analysis.

You provide a great sort of history of America's relationship with both Russia and China and the ebbs and flows in those relationships.

But you also get to a discussion of the current dynamics between those three countries and within each of those countries.

So let's start with Russia, a country you know tremendously well.

What are the dynamics driving Russian policy today?

We'll have you channel your inner George Kennan.

- Well, I've thought a lot about George Kennan, given that we were both ambassadors in Moscow, he in the Soviet Union, I in Russia.

And obviously in writing this book, I reread a lot of Kennan, and some things I agree with him and some things I disagree.

We'll come back to that in a minute.

But thanks for reminding your viewers of those historical chapters, because I did write these historical chapters, it starts in the 18th century, and I fought hard with my editor, just so you know, Jim, to keep them, because I wanted to show that there have been periods of cooperation before and I wanted to underscore that to make the simple point that we are not destined forever to be in conflict with China and Russia.

But to get to the contemporary period, I go through power, ideas, and competing conceptions of the global order.

And with respect with Russia, Russia obviously is the third power in this troika of great power competition, right?

The United States has way more power, China has way more power.

But because of that, I think sometimes administrations, including my own that I served in in the Obama administration, have looked at Russian power, it's a weak economic power, and concluded that we don't have to worry about Russia, that it's not an important country anymore.

We just have to focus on China.

And what I talk about in the book is it's not just about capabilities.

Intentions matter too.

And with respect to Putin and Putin's Russia, we have today a leader in Moscow that has much more limited capabilities, of course, than China or the United States, but is willing to use them in highly destructive ways, starting with the invasion of Georgia 2008, then the invasion of Ukraine in 2014, deploying his military to prop up Assad in Syria in 2015, and finally, and most dramatically, launching this full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

And so I remind my readers that ideology and ideas matter too.

And in this sense, Putin in some ways I think is more destabilizing to the international system than either Xi Jinping or President Trump.

- Could you say a little bit more about that?

Because one of the throughlines throughout the book is something about the, essentially, what's the story that each of these countries is telling the rest of the world that might attract others to their camp, as it were?

And in Russia's case, what is it that Russia is essentially offering others?

- So it's a great question, and, you know, because I was interested in comparing are we in a new Cold War or not, when I look at similarities, I say there's an ideological competition between the United States and Russia, United States and China.

But when looking at the ideological competition between United States and Russia today, it's not just between countries like it was during the Cold War, right?

Remember those maps, the red map, the blue map, you know, France was red, Poland was, no, France was blue, Poland was red.

It was a competition between communism and the free world that was kind of mapped out in a neat way between states.

What's different today in the ideological struggle with Putin is he is propagating not communism, but what I call illiberal populist nationalism, what he would call orthodox conservative values, and he's propagating those ideas within states, within Hungary, within Italy, within France, and within the United States of America.

And compared to the Cold War, he has many more followers for his set of ideas than we had communists in the United States during the Cold War.

You know, many Americans agree with Putin and admire Putin, even after this invasion in 2022, and that, I think, presents a very different kind of ideological challenge today compared to the Cold War.

- You might not be able to answer this question, but I'm gonna ask it anyways.

Do you think that that's a sincerely held conviction by President Putin?

Or is that an astute observation of sort of trends in conservative politics in the West and a way to exploit possible fissures in those societies?

- That's a fantastic question that I do not have a fantastic answer.

But I'll tell you, I've thought a lot about it.

I used to think it was just instrumental, just transactional.

And I used to think that about all the negative things that Putin would say about the United States when I was a US ambassador.

You know, he used to accuse me of fomenting revolution against him.

And I would look at that and I would talk to his advisor and say, "Come on, you don't really believe that, do you?"

I left Moscow as the ambassador in 2014 actually more convinced that he does believe these ideas, that he does think we're out to get him, that he does think democracy threatens him, and that he thinks to push back on that, he needs to find illiberal conservative nationalists as his allies.

So I've come to believe that actually he is committed to this ideology.

But I wanna underscore something that I think gets forgotten most certainly in foreign policy circles, most certainly in the administration when I served there, a leader can be a thug, a leader can be transactional, and a leader can be an ideologue all at the same time.

I think sometimes we wanna put leaders in one category or not.

And with respect to ideology, it can both be instrumental and a set of beliefs that animates your behavior at the same time.

I think that's most certainly true with Vladimir Putin today.

He is way more ideological, I think, than many Americans believe.

- Well, let's switch now to China and, essentially, what is China selling the rest of the world?

- So, again, with respect to power, China's way more powerful than Russia, economic power, military power, without question.

I still think when you add up the democracies, we collectively are much more powerful than the autocracies as long as we are united, and that is problematic these days, given how the president has been treating some of our allies.

But China, Xi Jinping and Xi Jinping thought, he's selling something different than Putin.

He's not selling illiberal populist nationalism.

He is offering up that state-led dictatorship can lead to economic development.

And that's a powerful set of ideas, by the way, if you're in a poor developing country that you wanna accelerate economic development.

They tend to focus, the Chinese tend to focus on Africa, Latin America, Asia, not the developed world.

You don't see a lot of Xi Jinping thought books even here in Palo Alto or Berkeley.

That's not a popular set of ideas in the developed world and they're not focused on it.

But in the developing world, they are, and it is attractive.

I think we are underestimating how attractive that set of ideas are.

I think what Xi Jinping gets wrong is that he sometimes forgets that the Chinese model that led to economic growth, fantastic economic growth in China, starting with Deng Xiaoping, was not state-led development, was actually the opposite.

It was actually pulling the state out of the economy, bringing in market principles, bringing in the ability to own things that led to economic growth in China.

And today, Xi Jinping is rolling that back.

He is getting the state much more involved in his own economy.

I think that's gonna slow growth.

I think we already see evidence of that.

And so when he seeks to export his model abroad, I think it's important for recipient countries to remember that it was when they adopted market principles that the Chinese system generated economic growth, not when they had more heavy-handed state-led communist, party-led development.

- Well, so that's a pretty good, I think, encapsulation of what the autocratic world is offering.

As I read this, I was thinking largely about that era in the 1990s when there was the Washington Consensus, and the world understood what the West offered, democracy, capitalist economies.

Is that still what the West, what democracies, what the United States offers the world today?

- I'm not sure.

It's part of the reason I wrote the book.

I want that to be true, in part because, you know, I agree with Churchill.

Democracy is a horrible system of government except for all the others that have been tried.

I also know that there's demand for democracy around the world.

Public opinion polls show that pretty clearly.

It's receded in the last 10 or 15 years, but it's still majorities.

But whether we are helping that cause, the United States of America in particular, I'm not so sure right now, I don't think President Trump divides the world between autocrats and democrats like I do.

I think he thinks about strong leaders and weak leaders and he's offering a different way to cooperate with the United States.

And I just don't think that's in our long-term national interests.

And so part of the reason I wrote the book was to make the case for why supporting ideas of freedom, and I would say ideas of capitalism and democracy are part of that, not only is the right thing to do, but it's the pragmatic thing to do in terms of American national interests.

I mean, think about it for a minute.

How many countries have we gone to war with who have been democracies?

None.

You know, we can argue about the War of 1812, you know, whether they were a democracy or not.

I don't think so.

But broad sweep, democracies don't go to war with each other.

We know that empirically.

How many times have we gone to war with dictatorships?

Almost every time we've gone to war, it's been with a dictatorship.

And you think about today what countries threaten our security and our prosperity, they're all autocrats.

China, Russia, Iran, North Korea.

So I think we have not only, it's a good thing in terms of the ethics of it and the morality of it to support democracy, it's also a very pragmatic thing to do.

But I'm not sure that President agrees with me and I'm not sure all Americans agree with me today.

And that's why I wrote the book, to try to help get in that debate.

- Well, you know, and so the question I think that emerges from that is, should democratization be the goal for US policy vis-a-vis Russia, vis-a-vis China?

You've written here and you've written elsewhere about the experience you had arriving in Moscow as the new ambassador and being accused of being sent there to foment a revolution.

What is the appropriate role for democratization in American foreign policy, particularly with great powers like Russia and China?

- Again, great question.

Hard to answer.

But I'd say a couple of things.

Number one, as I write in the book, because we are in an era of democratic recession, almost 20 years long now according to Freedom House in the world, and we're in an 11-year recession here in terms of our practice of democracy at home, I think the first order of business is defense.

Get our house in order here in the United States and help to shore up new democracies.

And on my top of my list, of course, is Ukraine.

They're fighting for their freedom and democracy.

But I believe that about the rest of the world.

We need to play defense first where we are welcome to help support democracy rather than undermining autocracies.

Number two, with respect to the harder question of China and Russia, I've kind of changed my views on this.

I want to tell you honestly.

I don't think we have the means to have a grand strategy for democratization for China or Russia today.

What I do think we should do instead is to support small D democrats from China and Russia, especially those living in exile, and to not back away from our own democratic values.

This is something I learned from my colleague here, he was a mentor of mine for many decades, George Schultz.

He was a Secretary of State for Ronald Reagan.

And he used to say, and he wrote in his memoirs, "We gotta engage with autocrats."

That's part of the job.

And when he came in in 1982, he was the one that started to reengage the Soviets.

I think that's chapter 29 of his memoirs, by the way.

And that was before Gorbachev, right?

But George had a very important principle.

We're not gonna check our values at the door when we do so.

And, you know, when I look at President Trump meeting with autocrats around the world, I think he tends to do that.

And I don't think you need to do that.

I don't think they're gonna do you any favors because you do that.

And then the third thing I would say is we need to keep investing in our soft power instruments.

So USAID, the Trump administration tore it down.

I think that's a big mistake.

If we're gonna compete with China and Russia, we have to have economic assistance as part of one of our instruments of power.

USAID, I wanna remind your viewers, was created by John F. Kennedy in 1961 not just because he was a good humanitarian, which he was, but because he understood that we needed that.

That's the height of the Cold War, right?

1961.

We needed USAID to compete with the Soviets.

Feel the same way about Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia.

Those are instruments of soft power influence that we need to compete with the Chinese and the Russians around the world.

And finally, the National Endowment for Democracy, an idea that Ronald Reagan had in 1982, and the set of NGOs connected to the National Endowment for Democracy.

We need to be supporting those organizations, not pulling financial support from them as is the trend today, because the Chinese, that's what they're doing with their NGOs supporting autocracy.

Same with the Russians, - You know, the part of the book that focuses on recommendations, this is a pretty comprehensive list.

Everything from, you know, revitalizing the American nuclear arsenal to maintaining a rigorous conventional deterrent.

But you also, throughout the book, talk about some of those elements of American power that are often unconsidered by the public, things like the attractiveness of American universities, like the power of immigration to sustain American economic growth.

Do you wanna say a little bit about those two points?

- I do.

I'm glad you raised it.

And you're right.

Jim, I originally had one prescriptive chapter, and now it's three prescriptive chapters, just so everybody knows.

And one of 'em is mistakes we made in the Cold War to not repeat again, right?

So I go through the mistakes.

But on the success side, yes, we do need to maintain our military.

I agree with President Trump on that.

We do need to have a robust economy, and here I worry that the current administration is eroding that.

One of the brilliant things we did during the Cold War is that we expanded federal government spending on research and development, and we channeled that money through our universities, making them, including the one that I work at here at Stanford University, some of the best universities in the world.

You know, doing basic research that then led to the application of that research to do some just fantastic things for health, fantastic things for, you know, new companies.

You know, many new companies came out of Stanford.

Multi-billion-dollar, almost trillion-dollar companies now all came out of Stanford.

I'm speaking at the Jen-Hsun Huang building tonight in a class.

And, you know, the Google guys, they were both students here at Stanford.

And that was really smart strategy that now we are undermining because there's this populist notion that we shouldn't be giving money to research universities.

I just think that's not in our long-term national interests.

And same with international students.

Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google, was one of them, right?

He came from the Soviet Union.

We, during the Cold War, attracted the best and the brightest from the entire world, including dictatorships, right?

Chinese, Iranians, Russians.

You know, where I live here in the Silicon Valley, you know, all those languages are spoken.

Indians.

And that is one of our great strengths when competing with China and Russia, because for decades, we've attracted the best and the brightest.

And now that we're in this anti-immigrant mood and celebrating, you know, that fewer international students are coming here, I just think this mess is a lesson, a success from the Cold War that I think we have to repeat if we're going to, you know, advance our interests in this new era of great power competition with China and Russia.

- So let's come back to the question that you began with.

Is this a new Cold War?

And what does that tell us about this era that we're in now?

- So my first answer is yes and my second answer is no.

And everybody needs to be able to hold those two ideas in their head at the same time.

I think if we just think it's just like the Cold War, we're missing elements that are different and we gotta be able to, in terms of getting the diagnostics right, we have to have both of those.

So let's talk about US-China relations briefly, right?

Similarities, there are many.

Two superpowers, yes.

China and the United States are ahead of the pack compared to the rest.

Ideological competition, yes.

Just like the Cold War, that is true today.

My book is called "Autocrats vs.

Democrats."

Three, is this a global contest that touches every country in the world?

Yes.

That is just like the Cold War.

And four, tragically, I predict in my book that this competition will last decades just like the Cold War did.

So those are all similarities.

But then on the other side of the ledger, there are differences that are just as important.

Number one, the United States and the, American and Chinese economies are highly intertwined today.

That's different than the Cold War.

The Soviet economy was very disconnected from the capitalist world.

That's different.

Moreover, the Chinese economy is highly intertwined with the global economy and just not the American economy.

And so if we think we can go back to some kind of blocs, you know, capitalist bloc versus the communist bloc, we might be able to do that and build up tariffs and go it alone for our economy, that will be a disaster for our economy, but the rest of the world is not gonna follow us.

So that is a difference that we have to keep in mind.

Second, I mentioned there's an ideological struggle in the world.

There is, between China and the United States.

But in my analysis in the book, it is not nearly as intense as the ideological struggle during the Cold War.

And this probably is one of the most controversial hypotheses I have in the book, but, you know, a lot of politicians say China's an existential threat to the United States, greatest threat we've ever had ever.

That is literally something that politicians and scholars write.

I looked hard at the evidence for that, and I don't see that.

I do not see that Xi Jinping is trying to destroy the United States, that's what existential means, off of the face of the earth.

Nor do I see evidence that they wanna make us a communist country.

And I think if we exaggerate that threat, we're gonna make mistakes in our prescriptions.

And then third, a difference from the Cold War is us.

You know, during the Cold War, we of course had debates about communism, the nature of the threat and how to pursue containment, right?

Containment was a very elastic term, meant different things to different presidents.

But there was a general consensus, Democrats and Republicans, that in order to deal with the communist threat, we had to remain engaged in the world.

That consensus is gone in America today.

There are isolationist tendencies that are deep in the Republican party, but they are growing in the Democratic party too.

That's different than the Cold War.

And second, the level of polarization within American society is much higher than at any other time during the Cold War.

And in some ways, I worry most of all of that because if we are fighting amongst ourselves, calling each other enemies of the state, we are not gonna have the capability to confront the security challenges we have in the international system, principally from China and Russia today.

- Michael McFaul, we could talk to you for another week, I think, but we're out of time.

The book is "Autocrats vs.

Democrats."

People need to check it out.

That's all the time we have right now.

But if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media or visit salve.edu/pellcenter.

Thank you for spending some time with us this week.

I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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