Democracies’ Strategic Edge Depends on Diplomacy and Allied Unity

Michael McFaul does not deny the severity of the moment. As Elliot Gerson summarizes the epilogue to McFaul’s book, the era of unchallenged American power, democracy as a universal value, and broad commitment to a liberal international order has ended. Great-power competition between autocracies and democracies has returned.

McFaul’s answer is not that democracies are destined to win. They retain substantial military, economic, institutional, and ideological advantages, he argues, but only if they remain united and use those advantages deliberately. Across Iran, Ukraine, China, and the Atlantic alliance, he sees versions of the same strategic failure: abandoning diplomacy too soon, treating institutions as burdens rather than assets, and alienating democratic partners whose cooperation multiplies American power.

His optimism begins with combined capacity. Add together the military power of democratic states, he argues, and, provided they remain united, they exceed that of China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran combined. The same broad imbalance holds economically. China’s growth has been extraordinary, McFaul says, and he welcomes the reduction of poverty it has brought. But he argues that the countries with the highest GDP per capita are democracies, as are eight of the world’s ten largest economies.

The condition is unity. Democratic strength is not self-executing; it depends on cooperation among states that have chosen to work together and on American willingness to treat alliances and institutions as strategic assets rather than constraints.

McFaul also argues that democracy’s appeal is not uniquely Western. Invoking Winston Churchill’s description of democracy as the worst system except for all the alternatives, he calls democratic self-government a universal idea. In his view, most people would rather vote for those who govern them and decide how tax revenue is spent than be ruled by a Communist Party, a theocracy, a military colonel, or an autocrat such as Putin.

That was the lesson he says Madeleine Albright impressed upon him: supporting democracy abroad is not simply morally desirable; it advances American interests. America’s most durable enemies have generally been autocracies, McFaul argues, while its most dependable allies have generally been democracies. He points to postwar Germany, Japan, and Italy, and to Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Estonia after the collapse of Soviet control, as examples of democratic transitions producing more reliable partners for the United States.

His historical case against fatalism is similarly comparative. Democracy was reduced to 12 countries in the 1930s. Marxism-Leninism appeared to be advancing across China, Southeast Asia, Angola, Mozambique, and Nicaragua in the late 1960s and 1970s, while American politics at home were strained. Those trajectories did not prove inevitable. McFaul does not claim that a democratic recovery is assured now, but argues that a difficult outlook is not a reason to abandon the effort. If the odds of prevailing are only 30 percent, he says, the task is to improve them to 31, then 32, then 33 percent.

The final basis for his optimism is personal rather than aggregate. McFaul has worked with small-d democrats from Iran, Belarus, China, Russia, and Ukraine. Their persistence leads him to see the present conflict as more than a contest over military balances or institutional design. It is also about whether people can govern themselves.

McFaul argues that the central failure in the current confrontation with Iran was choosing military action before diplomacy had been exhausted. His proposed discipline is clear: use coercion to create leverage for negotiation, reserve war for the point when other options have actually failed, and make the diplomatic effort multilateral.

His point rests on his experience in the Obama administration’s Iran policy. In the first Situation Room meetings of 2009, he recalls, the question was how to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. The approach was sequential: build multilateral sanctions, use them to bring Iran to negotiations, and make an agreement. Russia was a necessary participant in that effort, including in the negotiation of UN Security Council Resolution 1929 in 2010.

The resulting nuclear agreement, the JCPOA, had flaws, McFaul says, but it prevented Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. He rejects the claim that its expiration would have meant Iran could simply acquire one within six months. Sanctions mattered in this account, but as a means of securing negotiations rather than replacing them with force.

He contrasts that approach with what he describes as the Trump administration’s unilateralism. At the outset of the war, McFaul says, the announced goals included ending Iranian enrichment and achieving regime change. Five months later, he says, neither had been achieved, while the operative objective had narrowed to reopening the Strait of Hormuz—which had been open before the war.

For McFaul, that progression shows the danger of overreach: a campaign can begin with maximal objectives and end by managing damage created by the intervention itself. He sees no remaining coercive strategy that can credibly deliver the original aims. Repeated threats followed by reversals, he says, weaken diplomacy; if a government threatens force, it must be prepared to use it, a lesson he attributes to George Shultz.

The practical consequence is withdrawal rather than further escalation. McFaul argues that the United States should pull out of the conflict and seek a United Nations-led negotiation on reopening the Strait of Hormuz under international law. A bilateral negotiation between Washington and Tehran, he says, is unlikely to achieve that result.

McFaul separates support for democratic change in Iran from military invasion as a tool for producing it. For two decades at Stanford, he says, he worked with Abbas Milani, Larry Diamond, Iranian diaspora figures, and people inside Iran through the Iran Democracy Project. Its purpose was explicit: to devise strategies that could help end dictatorship in Iran. He agrees with the goal of supporting Iranian small-d democrats. He disagrees that military action was the only, or best, means.

Before the war, McFaul says, he outlined a more comprehensive strategy for supporting democratic forces in Iran while excluding military invasion. He does not claim certainty that his approach would have succeeded. His objection is to the assertion that force was the sole available instrument.

The historical record, as he presents it, is poor. Ten years after the use of military force to promote democracy, he counts four successful cases out of 19: Germany, Italy, Japan, and Panama.

That record informs his concern about Israel as well. McFaul says he has debated the Iranian threat with Benjamin Netanyahu since 2005, when Netanyahu argued that bombing Iran was the only answer. McFaul disagreed then and disagrees now. He does not regard Iran as having posed an existential threat to the United States, and says deterrence had been working before the military action. He accepts that Iran presents an existential threat to Israel, but still contends that deterrence and diplomacy offered a better way to manage it.

He worries that the conflict could encourage a longer-term regional turn toward nuclear capability. Saudi Arabia may seek a nuclear arrangement, McFaul says, and Egypt could follow. Israel could then face a region with several nuclear aspirants, including autocratic regimes whose stability may prove temporary over decades. He invokes the fall of the Shah as a warning against assuming that a seemingly durable authoritarian partner will remain durable.

Elliot Gerson frames Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a watershed in the struggle between democracy and autocracy. McFaul’s diagnosis is more specific: Vladimir Putin’s obsession is not primarily with NATO expansion, he argues, but with what he calls “democratic expansion.”

McFaul bases that judgment in part on direct encounters with Putin. In a meeting involving then-Vice President Joe Biden, Putin told the Americans that they made a basic mistake: because Russians “look like” Westerners, they assumed Russians think like Westerners. They do not, Putin insisted. Russia, in this conception, is a separate civilization: not part of a Western, liberal, democratic order, but a country whose traditions require a strong ruler.

McFaul treats that statement as a window into Putinism. The Russian president does not regard the title of czar as an insult, McFaul says; it fits a view in which Russian political legitimacy comes from civilizational distinctiveness and centralized rule rather than democratic consent.

Ukraine is intolerable within that worldview not simply because it occupies contested territory, but because its existence challenges Russia’s claimed political and national identity. McFaul says Putin has characterized Ukrainians as Russians with accents rather than a separate people. In that account, Ukrainians were detached from Russia first by the Bolsheviks and then by the CIA after the Soviet collapse. The invasion becomes an attempt to reverse that separation.

But Ukraine’s democratic development is the deeper threat. Ukrainians pursued closer ties to Europe and revolted in 2014 after their president declined to sign an agreement that would put the country on a path toward the European Union. For Putin, McFaul argues, a democratic Ukraine creates a dangerous example: people he says are essentially Russian are building a political system based on elections, civic dignity, and a Western orientation.

That is why the war cannot be understood only as a dispute over one province or another. Putin’s stated aim of “denazification,” McFaul says, was a call for regime change against Ukraine’s democratically elected Jewish president. The term is propaganda, but the objective behind it is serious: to destroy the Ukrainian state as an independent democratic project.

McFaul also describes a Kremlin trapped by the political consequences of its own system. Russia under Putin is, in his assessment, more autocratic than the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev. The ruler receives little candid information; subordinates have no incentive to tell him facts that would challenge his assumptions. That makes it difficult to alter course after the original plan has failed.

The war is therefore likely to continue, McFaul says, until Putin can no longer finance it or supply it with soldiers. He does not present negotiations or an external appeal to reason as the likely catalyst for a settlement. In his account, the relevant constraint is material capacity.

That judgment does not lead McFaul to treat Russia or Russians as intrinsically authoritarian. An audience member asked why the United States has portrayed Russia as evil instead of preserving the cooperative relationship of the early 2000s. McFaul rejects the premise that he has always held such a view. He distinguishes his own position from an influential school that sees Russia as permanently imperial, inherently hostile, and never meaningfully democratic.

He had lived in the Soviet Union, worked with Russian democrats in the late 1980s and 1990s, and considered figures such as Boris Nemtsov and Alexei Navalny close friends. Their democratic aspirations were real, he says; the possibility of another Russian trajectory was real too. In McFaul’s view, Putin’s rise was not the expression of an irresistible popular demand. He was selected by oligarchic interests to protect property, and Russia’s history could have developed differently had Nemtsov, once an heir apparent, become president in 2000.

Individual leaders matter, McFaul argues. Putin was not inevitable.

At the same time, he says he has had to revise his own expectations about how much support Putin has been able to mobilize for the war. A recorded call described to him by Andriy Yermak, Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, involved a Russian soldier allegedly boasting to his girlfriend about atrocities committed in Bucha while she encouraged him. The point, Yermak told McFaul, was that responsibility could not be assigned only to Putin. McFaul does not treat the matter as morally simple: the regime represses dissent so severely that asking Russians why they do not rise up ignores the fate of people such as Navalny. Yet Putin’s ability to rally parts of society behind the war cannot be denied.

The long-run outlook remains more hopeful than the present, McFaul says. Russia is too educated and too wealthy, in his view, to remain under dictatorship indefinitely. Over long periods, richer countries tend to break down as autocracies. He expects Russia eventually to do so as well.

Michael McFaul sees China and Russia as closer than they have been since the Sino-Soviet split, yet warns against treating them as a unified bloc with identical interests. Both propositions are necessary, he argues, if democracies are to formulate a strategy adequate to the present era.

The two governments share a fear of democratic legitimacy. Xi Jinping is threatened by Taiwan’s democracy in much the same way that Putin is threatened by Ukraine’s: both confront a nearby political community that demonstrates an alternative source of legitimacy. Democratic leaders themselves can become threatening symbols. McFaul points to Navalny and Nemtsov in Russia as figures whose existence challenged Putin’s account of why he should rule.

That common anxiety draws Beijing and Moscow together. But their relation to the international order differs sharply. Putin, McFaul says, wants to dismantle the liberal international system and return to a nineteenth-century order of bilateral power politics, where might makes right. China has benefited enormously from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and global trade. Beijing does not want to destroy the system; it wants to reshape it in ways more favorable to Chinese interests.

That difference is visible in China’s institutional strategy. Xi has been building multilateral groupings in which Beijing is the anchor: the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, BRICS, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the Belt and Road Initiative, and regionally focused forums. McFaul’s concern is not only that China is constructing these institutions, but that the United States has largely ceased creating comparable frameworks. The postwar United States built institutions that structured economic and security relations for decades. In McFaul’s telling, Washington is now retreating from that work just as Beijing is expanding it.

China’s support for Russia is also incomplete. McFaul notes that Beijing has sent components useful to Russian military enterprises producing missiles and drones used against Ukrainian civilians. But he points to limits. China has abstained rather than voted with Russia on UN General Assembly resolutions condemning the invasion, including since 2014. Chinese academic interlocutors in Beijing told McFaul they had no interest in subsidizing Russia’s war. The two states discussed a major gas pipeline during Putin’s visit, he says, but did not sign it.

Even their supply chains illustrate the ambiguity. Chinese components go into Russian weapons, but Chinese components also go into Ukrainian drones. McFaul presents that as evidence of partial alignment rather than an integrated alliance: if the partnership were fully unified, he asks, why would Xi permit Chinese components to reach Ukrainian drone producers?

The risks around Taiwan remain severe. McFaul says the probability of a serious war there may be greater than ever before. Yet he places Taiwan in a wider contest over political legitimacy, not only a narrow military balance. Taiwan matters to Xi, in his account, because people there practice democracy.

Michael McFaul identifies alliances as the United States’ greatest Cold War advantage. The Soviet Union had allies, but many were captive states. The United States had voluntary partners, especially in NATO, and that difference helped determine the outcome.

The implication for current policy is not simply that Washington should speak more politely to its partners. Democracies should organize power through agreements, shared institutions, and durable commercial and security ties, McFaul argues. Those arrangements are what convert aggregate democratic capacity into usable strategic capacity.

He is concerned that Washington is now weakening the very asset that made American power effective. His critique is directed squarely at the Trump administration’s approach to NATO allies, Canada, and Denmark. Threats involving Greenland, he says, are strategically unnecessary and politically destructive. Greenland is already within the NATO alliance. The United States can build bases, secure access, and develop critical-mineral projects through contracts rather than conquest.

The concern is not merely that such rhetoric offends allies. McFaul believes it can produce institutional and commercial consequences that outlast an electoral cycle. He describes meeting with Saab, the Swedish defense company, and warns that European firms and governments could increasingly decide to work independently of American companies if Washington signals that it wants Europe to go its own way.

That would be damaging to both sides, he argues, but especially counterproductive for the United States at a moment when it faces a more formidable group of authoritarian challengers.

The administration’s claim that it forced European allies to spend more on defense misreads causation, McFaul says. Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine caused the spending increase. European states are willing to invest more, but they want to do so in cooperation with the United States. The danger is that Washington turns a renewed willingness to share burdens into a rupture in the alliance itself.

He makes the same argument about Canada. Gerson cites polling showing Canadians now view China more favorably than the United States; McFaul calls the reversal shocking and tragic. The significance lies in the fact that Canada has historically been among America’s closest partners. A decline in favorability there is evidence, in his view, that American conduct can erode relationships that took generations to build.

McFaul emphasizes that the Cold War offers cautionary as well as successful lessons. Americans remember victory, he says, and can forget their mistakes. Overreach was the greatest of those mistakes. He also resists a triumphalist account in which the United States won the Cold War alone: Poles, Hungarians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and others were central actors in the weakening and eventual collapse of Soviet control. Allies and local democratic movements, on this account, are not accessories to American strategy; they are often decisive agents.

Michael McFaul sees political polarization as a serious danger, particularly because it pushes out the center. But he argues that the country is less ideologically fixed than elite media, national party structures, and electoral redistricting make it appear.

In 2008, Barack Obama won 47 percent of the vote in McFaul’s home state of Montana, losing by only a point and a half. That outcome, he says, illustrates a broader reality: many Americans are more politically “purple” than the national red-blue divide suggests.

The over-nationalization of parties has damaged democracy, in his view. Drawing on the political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset, McFaul argues that America historically contained not two parties but many regional variants. A Democrat in Alabama was not the same as a Democrat in San Francisco, and that diversity was a strength. The same applies across the political spectrum. Trying to make every local constituency conform to a single national ideological identity pushes politics toward extremism and weakens the center.

McFaul is not an expert on every domestic movement, he says, and declines to present himself as one. But he is worried less by elected democratic socialists than by federal government equity stakes in companies and by the prospect that some firms may receive special treatment while others do not.

His broader concern is that national-security questions have become folded into partisan identity. He worked at the National Security Council, he says, not the Democratic Security Council. The country must recover some sense of “Team America” because the challenges of the twenty-first century will be hard—perhaps harder than the Cold War—and no durable strategy can be built on a politics that treats allies, institutions, democratic values, and national security as partisan property.