Amb. Michael McFaul: China, Russia, U.S. and the New Global Disorder

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Now, has the United States entered a new Cold War with China? The answer, according to our next guest, is not a simple one. But the question highlights the changing world order and the fluctuating tensions between the two superpowers. As President Trump tours Asia, the world watches Washington confront a shift where autocracies form alliances and strengthen their influence without America’s involvement. The former U.S. ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, joins Walter Isaacson now to discuss his latest book exploring this power struggle.

WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you Christiane. And Ambassador Michael McFaul, welcome to the show.

 

MICHAEL MCFAUL: Thanks for having me.

 

ISAACSON: Your new book, “Autocrats vs. Democrats” —  it’s a great book, but somehow the title now I’m wondering, are we blurring the distinction between the two? I mean, what do you mean by the Democrats? And to what extent does that apply to Western nations, even the United States?

 

MCFAUL: Well, Walter, I’ve been working on this book for many years. I wrote most of it, 99% of it, before our last presidential election. And most certainly since President Trump won again and came back to office, he is blurring those lines in two different ways. One, he doesn’t frame the world like I do between autocrats and democrats, right? He sees strong leaders and weak leaders irrespective of the — if they’re democratically elected or not. And I just think that’s imprudent for American foreign policy going forward. And I’m talking about years and decades, not just what’s gonna happen in the next two to three years, but over the course of the 21st century — 

 

ISAACSON: Wait, wait. Why is it wrong or imprudent to not say, ‘Okay, these are strong leaders, we can have alliances with them?’ We’ve done that as, you know, ever since World War II.

 

MCFAUL: Yes, we had autocratic allies during the Cold War, and at times they were important to us. But our most enduring, closest allies were all democracies. And that was a great superpower we had during the Cold War, that we had really strong allies. The Soviets did not. 

 

And so I think in terms of managing and, and this new period of great power competition, we are better off supporting our democratic allies, number one, and supporting democratic ideas around the world, number two. Because that’s another advantage we have over the autocrats. Turns out public opinion shows all over the world — it varies from country to country — but most people prefer to choose their leaders rather than have God the Communist party or a soldier choose them. And if we give that away and we just act like the other autocrats, I think we lose that really vital instrument of soft power.

 

ISAACSON: You talk about and wrestle with the concept of whether we’re in a new Cold War, both with China and with Russia. Let’s start with China. Are we in a new Cold War with China? And what do we learn from the old Cold War if that’s the case?

 

MCFAUL: Are we in a new Cold War with China? Yes. Let me say that question again. Are we in a new Cold War with China? No, <laugh>. That’s why my book’s so long, because I think we’ve over — this debate in the United States has gotten too over simplistic. Either people didn’t know what the Cold War was or forgot about it. And I see elements that are similar and different. So with China, two superpowers in the world, they’re first among equals, ideological competition. That is true. They —  both countries do they seek to influence the world and not just their region. That’s also true. That’s like the Cold War. Will it last for decades? Tragically, I think this competition will last for decades just like the Cold War did. 

 

ISAACSON: Well, tell me how it’s different from the Cold War.

 

MCFAUL: Well, I actually think the list of differences is longer than the list of similarities. And I won’t try to go through all of them, but I think three are most important. So, one, the most obvious is that the U.S. and the Chinese economy are much more intertwined today than the American and Soviet economies were during the Cold War. And we’ve gotta figure out how to deal with that. I think the idea that we just decouple and go our separate ways is not only imprudent, we don’t need to do it, but I think trying to do so, we would fail. So we’ve gotta figure out a different strategy than what we had for the Cold War, for that set of problems. 

 

Secondly, there is an ideological dimension to this competition. My book, after all, is called “Autocrats versus Democrats” for a reason. But I don’t think the ideological struggle is, is as intense as it was during the Cold War. The Soviets wanted the whole world to become communists, including the United States of America. I just don’t see the evidence to support the hypothesis that Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party are doing that, although that’s a contentious debate, Walter, in my circles. Some people believe that. I just don’t, I think they’re wrong about it, and I think they’re overestimating the Chinese threat. 

 

But the third difference is about us. We are more polarized as a society than we were for most of the Cold War. We had some periods, obviously in the late sixties, as you know, better than I, early seventies, that America was polarized. But I think it’s deeper and, and more enduring now. And we’re also in an era of isolationism. We most certainly, for longer than we were engaged in the world, had an isolationist tradition, but we didn’t, during the Cold War. Democrats and Republicans basically agreed that we had to be engaged. They agreed to containment as a strategy, although that was a pretty elastic term during the Cold War. Now we have these isolationist tendencies strongest in the Republican Party, but also prominent in the Democratic Party. And I just don’t think that’s a strategy for success in the 21st century. But I — in part, I wrote this book to try to push back on him.

 

ISAACSON: President Trump is in Asia this week, meeting with Xi Jinping. Among other things, Xi Jinping will try to pin him down on the Taiwan issue, which is whether the United States supports independence of Taiwan. What do you think is the best approach?

 

MCFAUL: So when I teach at Stanford about history, I teach about events and bigger things like World War II and revolutions and things like that. But I also remind my students about non-events. Non-events don’t get enough attention. The greatest non-event of the Cold War was the war that didn’t happen over Taiwan. Tremendous diplomatic achievement in my view. And we gotta just keep that non-event continuing to happen. And I think that means two things in terms of the American foreign policy. One, enhance deterrence to make a war, an invasion of the island, costly. There are lots of things we can do. I go through them in the book, and there’s lots of things that people of Taiwan need to do. But two, resist what some politicians say when they show up in Taipei, that we support independence. I think that’s a recipe for disaster. And I just think keeping the status quo, however imperfect it is, is the best outcome that we can hope for.

 

ISAACSON: President Trump in his trip through Asia this week, did a whole lot of trade deals and alliances from Vietnam to Malaysia and other places. It almost seems like it’s from your book, that we need to create these alliances economically and in some ways politically. Do you think that that’s working?

 

MCFAUL: So the, each of those bilateral deals, and I would say other ones that the president has accomplished, those are, those are positive signs for American prosperity and security. I applaud the President. What I don’t like about his strategy is one, he doesn’t believe in trade. Fundamentally, he believes in tariffs. I think that is not smart for our long-term economic interests. Again, one of the great successes of the Cold War is that we united the free world with, with respect to trade and investment. And we used institutions like the World Bank and the IMF and later the World Trade Organization to unite the free world. After the Soviet Union collapsed, I think we went too fast to bring in the Chinese and the Russians to those clubs, and we paid the price for that. But generally speaking, uniting us around a common set of principles and rules of the game was a good strategy.

 

What I don’t like about the Trump strategy is it seems erratic. You know, an ad plays in Canada and suddenly we’re putting tariffs on them. That’s not, that’s not a strategy.

 

ISAACSON: You’ve said that you think that the rivalry in competition with China is a bit overestimated. And yet, do you feel that the Russian competition — our problems with Russia — is that underestimated?

 

MCFAUL: Exactly. I think that we made a mistake there. And I say that as a former Obama administration official, I think we also made a mistake. Which is when you go through the numbers, and I go through all the numbers in the book, I have lots of charts in the book. My editors didn’t like that, Walter, way too many charts. But I thought it was important to show the data about the balance of power between China, Russia, and the United States. And when you do that, Russia looks weak, right? Yeah, they have nuclear weapons. So they’re a superpower in that regard. But conventional military power, they’re not near the China, China or the United States, economically, they’re way down, right? They’re 11th out of the top 15 economies in the world. So capabilities wide,Putin is not as strong as Xi — in terms of capabilities.

 

But when we talk about intentions, which are much harder to measure a priori — before they’re, before power is used — what we’ve seen time and time again for the last 15 years is that the power that Putin has, he’s been willing to use it for, I think, very negative consequences, right? So he invaded Georgia in 2008. He went into Ukraine in 2014. He went into Syria with his Air Force in 2015, and then he launched this full scale invasion of Ukraine again in 2022. He doesn’t have the same military that either the United States or China has, but what he has, he’s using in these very imperial, and I would say destabilizing ways. And I think we’ve made a mistake in underestimating that. 

 

You know, when I was in the government, we talked about ‘Pivot to Asia.’ So did Trump, so did the Biden administration especially. And yes, we have to do more in Asia, but we also have to realize that the threat from Putin is real. And these things are intertwined. By the way, if Putin prevails in Ukraine that emboldens Xi Jinping with respect to Taiwan. Conversely, if we stop Putin and we push him, at least push him to a stalemate in Ukraine, I think that makes Xi Jinping a little less likely to invade Taiwan. So these things are actually, I think, highly intertwined.

 

ISAACSON: You talk about mistakes that may have been made during the Obama administration when you were there and rethinking things. One of the things that happened during the Obama administration was the idea of a reset, that we were going to suddenly reset our relations with Russia and have good relations. And you were at the core of that. Was that a mistake?

 

MCFAUL: No, it wasn’t a mistake. I think it was the right strategy. I, I, I was the Russia advisor at the NSC and then the ambassador. And our strategy, we took it right outta George Shultz’s memoirs. Remember, he wasn’t part of the original Reagan team. He comes in a couple years later and he looks at the lack of, of interaction with the evil empire — that’s what Reagan called the Soviets at the time — And he said, ‘That’s not smart. We got some interest with these folks. We gotta engage them to pursue our interests. But we should do so without checking our values at the door.’ And I think that’s a really great strategy for any American leader, for any Secretary of State when dealing with autocracy. 

 

So they got a bunch of things done, and so did we. We signed a START treaty, for instance, that got rid of 30% of the nuclear weapons in the world. That’s a good outcome for the American people, and I think the world. Second, we developed this supply route to, through Russia, to Afghanistan, so that we could reduce our dependence on Pakistan. It was 95% of our, our material for our, our soldiers in Afghanistan went through Pakistan. And we did that because we planned to take the war against terrorists to Pakistan. And we did that in 2011 and killed Osama Bin Laden. Couldn’t do that without the Russians. Three, we wanted to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons. And we thought that multilateral sanctions passed by the U.N. Security Council was a necessary condition for doing that. You can’t get a resolution through the U.N. Security Council without the Russians. We got them to vote for that, the most comprehensive set of sanctions against Iran ever. And that, I think, was a predicate for the Iran nuclear deal, which I still think was a good outcome for the American people. 

 

Now, the, the part I think people get wrong — or maybe I I, you know, we didn’t articulate it well enough — this reset was never about holding hands and singing kumbaya with these guys. I think that what we, we, we may have oversold that we had changed things, but all those outcomes were good for the American people. And I would do it just the same way if we had this, the, the chance to go back and rewrite history.

 

ISAACSON: You were a young person in Russia working, I think for the National Democratic Institute. When glasnost and perestroika brought down the Soviet Union, they opened up, more democratic. Was there anything we could have done that would’ve not led to the rise of Putin in authoritarianism again?

 

MCFAUL: Yeah, I think we did make some mistakes. I don’t think we did enough to help them make the transition to markets and democracy. ‘Cause we thought it was all over, right? It was the end of history, and we just thought everybody was gonna become democratic. And so we didn’t do with Russia that what we did do after World War II, Marshall Plan, to help the countries become part of the West. I think had we done that, we would have better outcomes. 

 

Two, I still think it was the right strategy to try to help build democracy in Russia. Like you said, I moved there as a young kid to try to do that. I don’t think that was a mistake, but we should have had a better hedge if it didn’t work. And that hedge, in my view, should have been a much more expansive NATO, much more rapid when Russia was weak. And two, if we couldn’t get everybody into NATO, ’cause they didn’t meet the criteria, we should have armed them. And I’m thinking principally here about Georgia and Ukraine. If Ukraine back in the 1990s had the weapon systems from, from the United States and NATO that they have today, I think that could have helped keep the peace. And that I think, was a mistake. You know, in retrospect, I, I wasn’t making that argument, but I think the Plan A was right. But we should have had a hedge in case it didn’t work.

 

ISAACSON: What should Trump be doing now? He’s having such trouble trying to solve the Ukraine issue. Is there any way to solve it easily?

 

MCFAUL: Not easily. Putin is an ideologue as I write about in the book. Too many people think he’s just a transactional guy that wants to do a deal. I heard that all the time when I worked at the White House, and I just don’t see him that way. I think he is on an ideological crusade to, to defend what he calls, you know, conservative Russian values against the liberal decadent West. And that’s his mindset. And he’s also an imperialist. He wants to be in the history books like Catherine the Great and Peter the Great. So he’s highly motivated by ideas and not transactions. But I do think we could do more. And it’s just, it’s the same thing I’ve been saying for three and a half years. Greater sanctions and more and better weapons. Wars tend to end in two ways. Either there’s a stalemate on the battlefield or one side wins right now. Neither of those conditions are present. The Russians are incrementally taking Ukrainian territory, and we have to help the Ukrainian warriors stop that progress before, I think, Putin sits down and talks about doing a deal.

 

ISAACSON: I wanna ask you a big broad historical question. It goes back to Thucydides. I know you’ve read Graham Allison and the Thucydides Trap, but let me quote Thucydides, when he is talking about rivals in power. He said, “What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear this caused in Sparta.” Could we say that right now, that what makes war inevitable is the growth of Chinese power and the fear that causes in the United States? Is that going to be an inevitable tension, or is it something we can overcome?

 

MCFAUL: It’s going to be an inevitable tension. That’s a good word, but not an inevitable war. There’s a difference. And everything starts with power. Everything starts with Thucydides. I have three chapters in my book about the rise and fall of power, but I add two more factors to the equation. I add regime type, and I add individual leaders. So I don’t think we’re just destined for war because of rise and fall of power. And, and sometimes it’s happened, but sometimes it hasn’t. Graham wrote about both those cases. We need to remember. It’s not inevitable. 

 

And, and part of my optimism about that is the Cold War. We use that phrase Cold War because we didn’t have a war with the Soviets. We had actually, we had lots of proxy wars and millions of people died. People forget that. You know, on, in both on both sides of the red and blue teams. But we managed to avoid a, a great war between them because of leadership. And especially after 1962, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, when we got a really close leaders on both sides said, ‘We gotta manage this competition.’ And we developed a whole bunch of crisis prevention mechanisms to do so. I think those are some good lessons for leaders in China and America today.

 

ISAACSON: Ambassador Michael McFaul, thank you so much for joining us.

 

MCFAUL: Thanks for having me. Great conversation.