JIM GILMORE - … Starting with The Washington
Post article, we now know that in early August,
the White House knew that Putin was the one
that had ordered things because he wanted
to defeat Clinton and to help Trump.
Why?
MICHAEL MCFAUL - Well, with respect to why,
I think it’s pretty clear.
You just have to look at what candidate Trump
was saying to understand why Putin would prefer
him as the president of the United States
compared to Secretary Clinton.
He talked about, for instance, “I would
look into recognizing Crimea as being part
of Russia.”
If you're Putin, that sounds pretty good.
He talked about NATO being obsolete, another
thing that Putin agrees with him on that.
He talked about lifting sanctions, another
thing that President Putin wants the United
States to do.
And most outrageously, for me personally,
was when candidate Trump compared our use
of force with Russia’s use of force.
He was on the Morning Joe television program
in December 2015, and he was asked about killings
in Russia, and he said something to the effect
of “Well, we do a lot of killing too.”
And that moral equivalency is an argument
that the Russians make all the time, the Russian
officials.
So, from that very simple point of view, Putin
looked at Trump and said, “This is better
for me.”
But there's one more piece of it, is that
Clinton said exactly the opposite on all of
this.
She was for strengthening NATO.
She was for keeping sanctions.
She would never in a million years recognize
Crimea as part of Russia.
And therefore, just on those points alone,
to me it’s pretty clear why Putin would
support Trump over Clinton.
JIM GILMORE - And your thoughts about the
fact that the White House had this information
for five months before any information came
out, the fact that not more was said so that
the public could understand what we knew?
Your reaction to that?
MICHAEL MCFAUL - The people working at the
White House at the time are friends of mine,
and they're friends of mine to this day.
I don’t want to trivialize how difficult
their decisions were.
They did not have good choices.
It’s not easy to say, “Oh, they should
have just said everything so the American
people would know,” because of course, politically,
they would have been criticized by candidate
Trump and all Republicans as politicizing
the election.
My own view is that they should have said
more.
And maybe it was not even that they should
have said more, but the way they said it might
have been different.
The one big statement they made in October,
which I think was a very good statement, important
statement, but it wasn’t rolled out in the
way—I used to work at the White House.
I worked at the White House for three years
in the Obama administration, and when we wanted
the press to see our news, we had rollout
strategies.
We got people on the television.
We brought journalists in the night before
to tell them about it.
I think they could have done more to elevate
the substance.
The substance of what they said, I think,
was correct.
JIM GILMORE - Also, the reaction of what we
did … Your quote in the Post is, “The
punishment did not fit the crime.”
What do you mean?
MICHAEL MCFAUL - I think there should have
been a bigger reaction in terms of sanctions,
after the election, so it’s no more about
politicizing things.
But let’s be clear: The Russians violated
the sovereignty of the United States of America.
They violated our sovereignty over one of
the most sacred things we do.
We choose our leaders.
That’s the most sacred thing you do as a
democracy.
And they meddled in that.
So to me, there needs to be a big response
to that.
How many people should be on the list or not,
we could argue about, but I think they should
have made it bigger and costly to those involved,
including people close to President Putin.
JIM GILMORE - And the reaction of the president—at
that point candidate Trump becomes president,
his reaction to all of this; his reaction
to the fact that he, to this day, he seems
to not believe that Russia was involved.
What is your view of that?
What are the consequences of that?
MICHAEL MCFAUL - I fear that our president
is mixing up politics with national security
and that he somehow believes, by acknowledging
the Russian interference in our election,
that will lead to people claiming that he
was illegitimately elected.
I think he’s wrong about that.
I don’t care if you're a Democrat or Republican,
you should be outraged if a foreign government
tries to influence the course of our sovereign
ability, our sovereign right to choose our
president.
And everybody agrees.
Everybody in my world agrees.
The entire intelligence community agrees.
This is not an argument about facts anymore,
in my mind, at all.
I think it would be a much wiser strategy
to say, “I respect the intelligence community’s
assessment, and I want to make sure it never
happens again.”
I think then people would stop talking about
whether we should have a rerun of the election.
I don’t know if anybody’s serious saying
that.
But he, by covering it up, by denying it,
continues to fuel interest.
And people saying, “Well, hey, why is he
doing that?
Why is he denying basic facts?,” that leads
to people wanting further inquiries about
what the Russians did and what the Russians
may have done with people in the Trump campaign.
JIM GILMORE - 2009, let’s go through the
chronology.
So you’ve gotten the title of the “architect
of the reset.”
MICHAEL MCFAUL - I've got to live with that.
JIM GILMORE - … What's the hope?
What are the goals?
And describe that moment of when you all went
with the button and everything else, and sort
of what was behind that.
MICHAEL MCFAUL - I was intimately, deeply
involved with the new policy formulation toward
Russia, that’s true, including that word,
the “reset.”
In my interpretation of what we were doing—I’ll
let other people speak for themselves—there
was no hope involved; there were only goals
involved.
And I think that’s one of the biggest misconceptions
of what we were trying to do.
When I first had the chance to talk substantively
with my new boss, the president of the United
States, I said that several times: We don’t
want to change the mood music here.
We want to get things done that are in America’s
national interest.
We want to get the START Treaty done and get
rid of 30 percent, or our ceiling lowered
at 30 percent, of nuclear weapons.
We want to get sanctions on Iran.
… We want to develop a supply route through
Russia for our troops in Afghanistan so that
we’re not dependent on Pakistan.
We want to get Russia into the WTO [World
Trade Organization] so that we can increase
American trade and investment that will be
good for American companies and workers.
Those are the goals of the reset.
And by the way, all of those goals I just
mentioned, we got done.
We got done more than probably any administration
in the first term of interacting with the
Russians or the Soviets.
The means to do it was engagement and engagement
at the highest levels.
The means was talk to [Dmitry] Medvedev, spend
time with him.
That was the essence of the reset.
JIM GILMORE - Did we understand the relationship
between Medvedev and Putin?
Did we understand the actual power situation?
Did we understand that to some extent, and
the fact that we wanted to empower Medvedev?
What was going on?
Or were there hopes there?
Was it naiveté?
MICHAEL MCFAUL - If the “we” is me, absolutely.
I can be criticized, and the president can
be criticized about what we should or shouldn’t
do in terms of policies.
But you can see, by my emotion now, when people
say that I am naive about the Russians, I've
lived seven years of my life in Russia; I've
written thousands, tens of thousands, maybe
millions of words about Russia by now.
I met Putin in 1991.
We were not naive.
We understood the relationship.
So I would say—and I had the opportunity
and privilege of briefing the president on
all things Russia for three years at the White
House—I would never describe his view toward
Russia and the reset as naive.
What I think people don’t understand is
you don’t get to choose who is the president
and the prime minister.
You don’t get to choose their configuration.
You deal with, because of protocol, your interlocutor.
President Obama’s interlocutor in Russia
was President Medvedev, not Prime Minister
Putin.
If you show up at the G-20 or the G-8 or the
U.N. General Assembly or APEC [Asia-Pacific
Economic Cooperation], those are the times
that diplomacy gets done.
President Medvedev is at all those meetings;
Putin doesn’t show up.
Now, I’ll tell you honestly, we tried.
They were my ideas.
We tried to figure out interesting, creative
ways to have more engagement with Putin.
When we went to Moscow in July 2009, we had
a three-hour meeting with Putin.
That was, of course, we wanted to do that.
We tried to set up a bilateral Presidential
Commission that the vice president, Vice President
Biden and Prime Minister Putin could chair
to give us another shot to interact with them.
The vice president said yes; the prime minister
said no.
And even in one of my more creative schemes,
I created an excuse one day to call Putin
because we were talking about Olympics.
That’s his area of expertise, right?
And that was the excuse.
President Obama called him, and we had a discussion
about our failed bid to get the Olympics to
Chicago.
We came in fourth, I believe.
It was a pretty bad outcome for us.
They had a very nice chat about how to win
bids.
Putin is an expert at that, and he loved talking
about that.
And when the president, President Obama said,
“Hey, by the way, I’d like to ask you
a little bit about Iran,” he said: “That’s
not my job; I'm not president.
But I happen to have the president sitting
right here.
I’ll put him on the phone.”
And that was a clear signal to us of who was
in charge of foreign policy and who was not.
So, you know, that was our fate.
And then, obviously, down the road, those
two gentlemen changed their job in Russia.
JIM GILMORE - I'm going to ask you the hardest
question I'm going to ask you.
You knew him in 2001?
MICHAEL MCFAUL - 1991.
JIM GILMORE - 1991.
MICHAEL MCFAUL - If I said 2001, I—
JIM GILMORE - I think you said 1991.
Who is he back when he comes in, in 2000,
or really in power, in 1998-1999?
And who he is when he comes back in the third
term in 2012?
How does he evolve, and why?
MICHAEL MCFAUL - I think he did evolve.
In my world, the Russia followers, Kremlinologists,
this is a big debate.
But my own view is that he changed rather
dramatically in a couple of ways.
He never was a fan of democracy, and he made
that clear in the first six months of his
time as president in 2000.
But he did have an open mind about markets
and dealing with the West, engaging with the
West.
Over time, he became more suspicious of markets
and more suspicious of the West.
People forget that in February 2000, very
famously in an interview, when asked about
NATO, he said, “Well, maybe we should join.”
That was Putin back in 2000.
That was not Putin when he came back as president
in 2012.
The other thing I would say is he became much
more suspicious.
He was always suspicious as a KGB officer
of the United States of America.
That he was trained to do, and we were the
enemy.
But I think he became more suspicious over
time of what I would call popular movements,
spontaneous popular movements, and what he
would call CIA operations to overthrow regimes
we don’t like.
And that fundamental difference, by the way,
was the chief tension in Obama-Putin relations
after Putin came back as president, because
I lived through the Arab Spring at the White
House.
We had nothing to do with what happened in
those countries.
We reacted to them just like everybody else
did.
But when we sat down with Putin, he had a
different theory.
He thought that we fomented those revolutions
to overthrow regimes we didn’t like.
And then when demonstrations happened in his
country, in the same year—you’ve got to
remember, it starts in Tunisia, but then it’s
Egypt, and then Syria, and then Libya—and
in the same year, people are demonstrating
against their leader on the streets of Moscow.
He sees a pattern there, and he sees our hand
behind it.
And that was the central drama over which
we could never recover our relationship.
JIM GILMORE - And Libya, for instance, and
his paranoia, it seems, over Libya, and the
stories of him watching Qaddafi’s murder
video over and over and over again, did we,
our government, ever sit down with him and
sort of help try to explain that we did not
cause this?
MICHAEL MCFAUL - Yes.
JIM GILMORE - I mean, we tried to temper this
paranoia?
MICHAEL MCFAUL - Yes, of course we did.
You know, the most important substantive conversation
early on that the president really dug into
that, we were in Los Cabos in Mexico.
Again, it must have been a G-20, because that’s
where presidents meet, right.
So there they were.
And that’s the summer of 2012.
Putin—this is his first meeting with President
Obama as President Putin.
By the way, we tried to set up earlier meetings,
and he refused our invitation.
We invited him to come to the White House
right after his election, and he didn’t
come.
He chose to send Prime Minister Medvedev to
that G-8 summit.
So this was our first big, substantive conversation
of that.
The president explained to him, he said: “Look,
we’re not behind this.
I'm not a regime-change guy.
We are responding to these events, and in
our view, we’re better to engage, to try
to push these things toward peaceful evolutionary
change, because if we don’t, they’ll end
up as violent revolutionary change.”
And Putin’s pushback was: “You know, you
don’t understand this part of the world.
You don’t know what you're doing.
You should have supported [Egypt’s Hosni]
Mubarak, and just like I'm going to support
[Syria’s Bashar al-]Assad, because strongmen
is what you need to have change.”
Now, Putin has a theory of change himself.
It should be clear; it should be admitted.
I think he gets a bum rap sometimes on that.
He thinks that societies need to modernize,
and they need to change, but they need to
do it with a strong leader to guide the masses
in the right way, in an evolutionary, slow
way.
After all, I think that’s what he thinks
he’s doing inside Russia.
JIM GILMORE - 2012, when you get there [to
Moscow], the demonstrations have been going
on.
Secretary Clinton has said some things about
the need for good elections after it was clear
that parliamentary elections were certainly
flawed.
And certainly that’s what the demonstrators
believed.
MICHAEL MCFAUL - That was a statement Mr.
Putin didn’t like.
JIM GILMORE - Yeah.
Explain that.
But also explain why—I mean, you met with
some opposition leaders when you got to town,
which ambassadors always do, and immediately
you're targeted as well.
Explain his attitude, how he turns the blame
for the demonstrations on you and Hillary
Clinton.
MICHAEL MCFAUL - Again, remember, Putin had
been in power for eight years as president.
Those were great years in terms of Russia’s
economic development and stability after a
decade of depression.
They lifted themselves out of that.
Whether or not Putin had much to do with that,
that’s a different debate.
But if it happens on your watch, if you're
an American president or a Russian president,
you get credit for it.
And he most certainly had a fantastic run
during that period.
When he came back and ran as president in
2010, and in the winter of 2011, he wasn’t
greeted with a lot of enthusiasm.
There were instances where he was even booed
at different events, and that was very unsettling
for him.
Then, in the midst of all that, running for
president as a third term, not the same enthusiasm
as you had before, all of these demonstrations
happened.
First of all, he was very upset.
He was pissed at these people for demonstrating.
He was like, “I made you rich; now you're
turning on me.”
But his second reaction, he was nervous.
Remember, this is the year of the Arab Spring.
And remember, the last time that those numbers
of people had demonstrated on the streets
of Moscow was 1991, 20 years earlier, the
year that the Soviet Union collapsed.
So that was a very unnerving thing for them.
They needed a political strategy to win the
election, but also a strategy to suppress
and to contain these massive demonstrations.
That’s when it became very convenient to
say that these protesters are supported by
the United States or supported by Barack Obama
and, when I landed there in January 2012,
supported directly by me; to portray them
as traitors, as enemies, the fifth column,
supported by the West as a way to bolster
his electoral base and as a way to weaken
and marginalize the opposition.
JIM GILMORE - The same media was saying that
you were giving opposition leaders their instructions.
You were paying people.
And it got people following you around.
Just describe a little bit about the pressures
that were put upon you.
MICHAEL MCFAUL - Well, that was my fate, right.
Correlation is not causation, as we like to
say here at Stanford, and the fact that I
arrived in the middle of that had to do with
our long confirmation process in America.
Nothing to do with Russian politics.
But in Russia, that was not the way it was
portrayed.
In Russia, it was portrayed that I was sent
deliberately by President Obama to lead the
revolution.
And given my background as an academic, I've
written about the political transitions and
democratization, that was a very easy story.
If you control the press, that’s a very
easy story to put together.
In fact, one of the top Kremlin people that
I've known for a long time said: “You know,
Mike, you are like manna from heaven for our
campaign.
I mean, you just showed up, and this was so
easy.
And you look like an American, and you act
like one.”
He was like, “Thank you for showing up when
you did, so that we can create this story.”
And you know, it was frustrating for me, of
course, because I wasn’t sent there to foment
revolution.
I was sent there to continue the reset.
I'm Mr. Reset, not Mr. Revolutionary.
But no amount of tweeting and conversation—that
was just too perfect story for them.
And yeah, that was my fate.
JIM GILMORE - And the hatred he seems to have
toward Hillary Clinton, the sticking this
also on her—a lot of people go back and
see this and also Kosovo earlier on with [President
Bill] Clinton’s administration, there seems
to have been an aggression toward them, a
need to hit back at some point, and therefore,
leading up to the elections, to some extent.
Tell us what you know about—was that real?
Was that façade, the attitude toward Clinton?
MICHAEL MCFAUL - I don’t believe it’s
about the Clintons.
I think it’s about a Clinton.
In fact, President Clinton had a pretty good
working relationship with Putin and would
see him subsequently after that.
They would meet.
I think it was really about her.
It was especially about the perception that
they had that when she made that statement,
criticizing that parliamentary election, Putin
said it himself.
He said that was a signal to the protesters
to go out and demonstrate.
Now, that is not true.
I know the demonstrators, and I have analyzed
the data about the demonstrators.
They weren't waiting for Hillary Clinton to
do what they did, but he thought that we were
being supportive of them.
And partially, Putin is right about that.
Let’s be clear.
We did criticize the election.
That was a choice we made.
I was part of that decision-making process.
The idea that Russia should be more democratic,
that’s an idea that Secretary Clinton held.
You can say it’s neutral, and we just are
for the process; we don’t care about the
outcome.
But if you're Putin, running for re-election
against these demonstrators, it doesn’t
sound neutral; it sounds very partisan, and
he resented her for that.
There were other things, too, by the way.
There were other things that she said that
annoyed them.
She once called one of his most important
foreign policy projects, it’s called the
Eurasian Economic Union, she called it the
re-Sovietization of that part of the world.
They really didn’t like that comment.
I was called in by the Foreign Minister [Sergey]
Lavrov after that comment, and they let it
be known they did not appreciate that.
But that, in particular the perception that
we were meddling in their elections, I think
created some incentives for him to meddle
in ours.
JIM GILMORE - And Mr. Putin seems to hold
a grudge.
MICHAEL MCFAUL - He holds grudges, yes.
JIM GILMORE - The reset is at this point over?
MICHAEL MCFAUL - Yes.
JIM GILMORE - I mean, is that what the assumption
is in the White House at that point?
MICHAEL MCFAUL - Well, in 2012, we had a debate
about it.
The Obama administration were a deliberative
group.
My view, and I wrote this at the time, I thought
the reset was over in 2012 and that we needed
to have a different approach toward Russia.
I wrote about it and argued about it.
But there was inertia, because the president
wanted another START [Strategic Arms Reduction
Treaty] agreement and lower numbers.
If you work on arms control, you don’t want
to abandon that.
Others wanted to move forward on trade and
investment issues, so we didn’t abandon
it.
Most centrally was our diplomacy around Syria,
where many senior officials, including the
new secretary [of state], Secretary [John]
Kerry, thought that Russia had to be part
of the solution.
So they weren't ready to pivot entirely away
from that.
But analytically, from my point of view, I
thought the reset ended in 2012.
JIM GILMORE - … You’ve written that one
of these conclusions that he comes to, at
this point, is that he needs to have the United
States as an enemy, which is a very difficult
thing to therefore fight and to accomplish
things.
Just define that point of view that you have
about that.
MICHAEL MCFAUL - We became the enemy again
in Russia when he was running for president
in 2012.
Now, I think it’s important for your viewers
to remember that just two years earlier, 60
percent—and some polls are even higher—of
Russians had a favorable attitude toward the
United States of America.
He changed that.
We didn’t change our policy.
We didn’t do anything different.
He changed that for domestic, political reasons.
He needed an enemy so that he could say he
was the defender against the United States
and their evil allies, including, later in
the story, when we support alleged Nazis that
overthrew the government in Ukraine in 2014.
I think he’s trapped by that narrative.
I think it’s very hard to tell your electorate
and your supporters that I'm the fighter,
and I'm the champion against this evil empire
and then one day wake up and say, “Oh, now
we’re going to cooperate with them.”
I think that’s part of the drama you see
today in terms of the difficulty, despite
what President Trump has said and what President
Putin has said, of trying to do another reset
or another détente.
I know the president doesn’t like the word
"reset," so let’s call it détente.
I think that will be a constraint for President
Putin.
JIM GILMORE - Let’s talk about Ukraine,
2014.
Take us to that moment.
How are we viewing it?
How surprising is it?
What do we perceive our role to be?
And when it all goes kablooey, when Yanukovych
flees, what are you thinking?
MICHAEL MCFAUL - … I just want to represent
my views sitting in Moscow as a U.S. ambassador
and to realize that I see it through a particular
set of—what's the right—prism, or whatever
the right metaphor is, because my job is to
understand what the Russians are thinking.
And it was my view, at the time of the negotiations,
is that Yanukovych was in a bidding war between
us, the Europeans and Putin, and once Putin
won that bidding war, which I predicted he
would do, Yanukovych would pull out, take
the money, and use that money to run for re-election
the following year.
And, by the way, that’s a rational strategy.
Whether it’s good or bad, that was definitely
my view, talking to people in Moscow about
what they did.
In fact, I met a very senior Russian government
official right after the deal was done who
told me: “We wanted to pay $8 billion.
We had to pay $15 billion.
But the boss said to get this done, so we
paid whatever price we had to.”
Nothing of that was surprising to me at all.
What was surprising to me was the reaction
inside Ukraine.
I just assumed he wouldn’t sign today, but
we’re diplomats, you know; let’s start
a new negotiation.
That’s what we do.
He’ll sign next year, and we’ll have a
process.
And lots of the things that happen in the
European Union, by the way, are about process.
So I didn’t think it was a big deal that
he didn’t sign on that particular day.
We would just start it again.
But that was not the view of Ukrainians, independent
Ukrainians, by the way.
It had nothing to do with us, who said—[the
Ukrainian journalist] Mustafa Nayyem most
famously said on Facebook, “I'm pissed off
about this, and if, you know, whatever X amount”—I
think 10,000 was his number—“if 10,000
of you like my Facebook statement here, then
we’ll show up in Maidan.”
That was surprising to me, and that turn of
events I would not have predicted.
Then we worked—not me personally, but our
government—to try to help negotiate a solution,
a peaceful end to that standoff between President
Yanukovych and the opposition.
The vice president was deeply involved in
this, calling both sides.
Assistant Secretary [of State for European
and Eurasian Affairs] Toria Nuland was deeply
involved with both sides, talking to both
sides, to try to make that deal.
Most importantly, the Europeans were the ones
leading that charge.
We were kind of supporting that.
Feb. 22 was a great day.
We thought we had a deal.
We thought we had a way out.
The opposition, three leaders of the opposition
signed it.
Yanukovych signed it.
I was in Sochi at the time, at the Olympics,
on my Blackberry, a lot of “Hooyahs” and
“Booyahs” about a great achievement.
Several hours later, Yanukovych fled.
Some people in our government thought that
that was a good thing, and that this was another
revolution like the Orange Revolution.
I personally was nervous, because there was
just no way that Putin was going to allow
that to happen and not react with something.
And the rest is history.
He reacted very emotionally, reactively, first
to take Crimea.
And when that turned out to be pretty easy,
relatively cost-free, he doubled down in his
intervention in [Ukraine’s] Donbas.
JIM GILMORE - And the way he did it, part
of what we’re doing is tracking sort of
the growth of hybrid techniques.
So what happens in Georgia?
What happens in Estonia before that with the
cyber?
What happens then in Crimea, and the lies
involved, and the misinformation, the fake
news and the hacking?
And then kinetic, as well, in Ukraine.
Describe what we’re thinking, that our government
is understanding about this.
I mean, you can track it.
You can see what's happened.
But perhaps we didn’t.
But Crimea and Ukraine, eastern Ukraine, it
becomes apparent that there is a new way of
warfare that he is using that is very difficult
to deal with.
MICHAEL MCFAUL - I’d say a couple things
about that.
One, we were tracking it, and in our various
scenarios, the idea that we didn’t think
about this, that just is not my perception
from the debates.
All of government is about different options,
about predictions, from the least to the most
egregious; in this case, annexation.
But to say that we were analyzing it does
not mean we had good options to respond to
it.
And I remind people that every time the Russians
used force in Eastern Europe, whether it’s
1956 or 1968 or 2008 in Georgia or 2014 in
Ukraine, we don’t have great options as
a government, or as an alliance, in terms
of how to respond to that.
That said, my own view was the initial response
to annexation, I thought—I had left the
government by then.
Actually, I had left the government right
then.
The day he went in was the day I flew home.
Didn’t invade on my watch.
But I think initially, the response from Europe
and the Obama administration could have been
a little more robust.
Annexation, after all, is—“Thou shall
not annex territory of thy neighbor” should
probably be up there in the top 10 commandments
of how to behave as a civilized state.
But then, when he went in into Donbas, in
that operation, I'm deeply impressed by what
President Obama and Chancellor [Angela] Merkel
did.
No time in history have we ever put together
such a comprehensive response of containment
and punishment.
The chief of staff of the Kremlin has never
been on the sanctions list, on the American
sanctions list, until they did that.
And now the numbers are substantial and, I
think, correct.
By the way, it’s affected me personally.
I'm also on the sanctions list.
I'm part of the tit for tat, so I can't travel
to Russia.
But that was the correct response.
JIM GILMORE - But as you know, there's a debate
that’s going on in Washington, within the
White House, within certainly State Department
as well, over the fact of arming with defensive
weapons to the Ukrainians, and that was the
line that we needed to at least draw to slap
back at Putin more heavily, to make them understand
how important this was.
And that does not happen.
Some people, to this day, say that we didn’t
do enough, that the sanctions did not do enough.
Your overview of that?
MICHAEL MCFAUL - In real time, when that debate
was happening, both in interacting with my
friends in the government and publicly, I
supported lethal assistance.
I was on the record on that.
I think that was appropriate.
I had a set of arguments about it at the time.
I do not think it was the critical—had we
done that, everything would have changed.
No way.
That’s naive.
I appreciated the counterarguments from Obama
administration officials that that might have
escalated things and that that would have
been difficult for us to win an escalatory
game.
But let’s be clear.
It wasn’t just sanctions.
We did comprehensive sanctions against—we,
the United States, not me personally, the
EU and the United States—against the individuals
and companies.
We bolstered NATO for the first time since
the end of the Cold War, rightly in my eyes,
so we did many things to make the NATO commitment,
especially in the Baltic states, stronger.
That was the right thing to do.
Third, we assisted to the tune of multibillion
dollars of assistance, the Ukrainian government,
with the IMF, with the EU money, with American
money, to try to make that—and I think,
of all those things, that is the most important
thing.
The way to defeat Putin is to have Ukraine
succeed.
That’s a pretty comprehensive—I could
go on.
But I think those are very hard things to
do in diplomacy, and I applaud the administration
for doing it.
JIM GILMORE - But I will play the devil’s
advocate.
They still have Ukraine, or they still have
Crimea, and they're never going to give it
back.
And they are still fighting a war in eastern
Ukraine.
MICHAEL MCFAUL - Yep, they don’t have Odessa.
They don’t have Novorossiya.
Do you even remember that word, Novorossiya?
I hope you forgot it, because that was the
word that they were using at the time to say,
in the same exact way, that Putin talked about
Crimea: “Who gave away Crimea?
Why did they do that?
Khrushchev was an idiot.
That’s always been our land.”
After that, he started saying the same thing
about Novorossiya.
He said: “That wasn’t theirs.
That was always part of the Russian Empire.
Maybe we should do that.”
And the fact that we’re not talking about
Novorossiya, neither us nor Putin, that, I
think, is a sign of success, first and foremost
of the Ukrainian military.
I want to make sure I'm clear about that.
They fought them to a standstill.
They defended their sovereignty.
But we helped them in that.
That's a good outcome.
So yes, Crimea, that’s a long-term thing,
though never say never.
Lots of people thought that Estonia would
also be part of the Soviet Union forever.
It took 50 years, but eventually that was
reversed.
It wasn’t the best outcome, but it wasn’t,
most certainly, the worst outcome.
JIM GILMORE - So, just to clean up: this argument
that we didn’t act harshly enough in Estonia,
we didn’t act harshly enough in Georgia,
and when Ukraine and Crimea happened, we didn’t
put the red line down so that he understood.
So he came, and he got involved in our elections.
Why not?
…
MICHAEL MCFAUL - I don’t see those things
as related in that way.
I think that he took Crimea, and he intervened
in our election.
I don’t see it that way.
I see them as separate, different phases of
a major conflict, a major confrontation, multifaceted
confrontation that we are having with Russia
and we’re going to have with Russia for
years, if not decades, to come.
In each place, we need to have the right response
of offense and defense.
Of course we need to do things differently
to protect our elections moving forward, but
I don’t think it’s the result of what
happened in Ukraine.
JIM GILMORE - So with President Trump, when
President Trump is making statements like,
in the election, that sanctions can be negotiated,
when his people go to State Department after
he is in office and start talking about the
fact that “We need you people to start figuring
out how we unwind the Ukrainian sanctions”—
MICHAEL MCFAUL - Yeah.
JIM GILMORE - —what are you thinking?
MICHAEL MCFAUL - I'm 100 percent for lifting
sanctions on Russia, provided they change
their behavior for why the sanctions were
put in place.
It’s just that simple.
I think that it was incredibly naive of candidate
Trump and occasionally President Trump.
It’s a bit confused right now what their
policy is.
But to say we should just lift sanctions so
that we can get along with Russia, what kind
of policy is that?
That’s not a policy.
I would say this about France and Germany,
by the way.
The policy of the United States of America
should never be to have good relations.
We should have objectives that we seek, that
we should define, and then we should figure
out the right strategies to achieve them.
And with respect to sanctions, I think it’s
clear.
If Russia gets out of Ukraine, then we should
lift sanctions.
But we shouldn’t do it just so we can have
a nice summit in Moscow.
JIM GILMORE - When you heard the first time
about the Russian hacking, and the fact that
it was tied to the Russians, what were you
thinking?
Were you surprised that all of a sudden he’s
bringing these—more and more we understand,
the level of the hybrid war that he brought
to bear, not kinetic, but everything else
in his tool bag.
What did you think?
Were you surprised?
And how should we understand this?
How should we view this?
MICHAEL MCFAUL - I was initially surprised,
because it was really audacious.
It was a fundamental escalation.
This has never happened before in our country.
We’ve never done that in their country.
Even though we have the capability to do that,
we've never done that.
And in particular, the stealing of the data
and then publishing of the data, that’s
a qualitatively new style.
And that suggested to me that the things I
had said before publicly, when I was criticized
as being a cold warrior and "McFaul, because
they hassled you as ambassador, you became
too much of a hardliner," on one hand confirmed
my assumptions about the Putin regime in general,
but it also, he upped the ante with that.
The second thing that shocked me, I’ll tell
you honestly, was how indifferent the American
people were to it.
I was on TV.
I published an article in August 2016 in The
Washington Post talking about it, why he would
want to do it and what he’s been doing.
I was frankly surprised even by our own press,
how we just didn’t really think it was a
big deal.
Somebody more sophisticated needs to explain
that.
This was a violation of our sovereignty.
It’s—thankfully, people didn’t die as
they did in 1941 or Sept. 11, but it was a
violation of our sovereignty.
I was very surprised by the indifference to
it here in our country.
JIM GILMORE - Final question: So where are
we now?
Some people say that we are at war, that we
are in a second Cold War.
How do you see it, and how important is that
for us to understand?
MICHAEL MCFAUL - The analogies are tricky.
Is it a Cold War or hot peaks?
I like hot peaks, just so it has the same
connotations, but it’s somewhat different.
And that’s what it is.
I think there are lots of parallels to the
Cold War, but there are also differences,
both in the ideological content and in the
methods in which we’re fighting about what
you and I have been talking about, right?
But let’s make no mistake that Putin sees
us fundamentally as a competitor when he’s
in a good mood, as an enemy when he’s in
a bad mood.
He defines the relationship in zero-sum terms.
He has shown that the cards that he has, the
instruments of power that he has are much
weaker than ours, but he has demonstrated
that he’s intent on playing them in a way
that we feel much more reluctant to do.
And I don’t see anything changing, fundamentally,
in his calculation about Russia’s attitude
toward the West and the United States.
For 30 years, since the end of the Cold War
until 2012, the project with Russia from the
West was a, to support markets and democracy
internally, and b, to support the integration
of Russia into the West.
Those projects for Putin are over.
He doesn’t want to join our clubs.
He doesn’t want to be part of our clubs
and accept our rules.
What I don’t know: Have we as a country
and we in the West fully understood how over
that project is in Russia?
That to me is the drama about foreign policy.
That’s the drama that the Trump administration
is fighting about right now.
To me it’s pretty clear, but it’s still
a debate within the West.
JIM GILMORE - Great.
Thank you very much.
