An Ambassador’s Animus
Michael McFaul misunderstands history and theory. Again.
In his article Putin, Putinism, and the Domestic Determinants of Russian Foreign Policy, McFaul takes aim at two imposing targets: the realist school of international relations theory and Russian President Vladimir Putin. It’s a misfire.
McFaul argues that policy is governed by individuals, their ideas, and institutions, not an unchanging conception of “national interests.” As with his book, From Cold War to Hot Peace, McFaul’s assertions about specific policy (and more broadly, theory) are undercut by evidence he himself provides.
While conceding that “power matters” several times in the article, McFaul aims to trace “… the impact of Putin’s illiberal ideas to understand specific Russian foreign policy actions that depart from realist predictions.” Through errors both major and minor, these analyses fail, but they do illuminate liberal foreign policy thought and practice.
The story begins in Ukraine. The 2005 Orange Revolution, McFaul notes, hardly provoked a response from Russia (save for the alleged poisoning of the to-be liberal president Viktor Yushchenko). In 2014, however, after Russian-friendly Viktor Yanukovich was driven out of Ukraine by street protests, Russia illicitly invaded it. Why did Putin react differently?
McFaul develops his explanation thusly: “Putin had developed a theory about US leaders’ proclivities to overthrow regimes that they disliked,” he argues, citing the myriad “color revolutions” that have popped up in former members of the Soviet Union. While he intends for the reader to dismiss this as paranoia, in his 102nd footnote McFaul states that Western organizations were involved in the 2005 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, citing himself.
Democracy in The United States — and Russia
Despite his amiable, bipartisan tweets and media image, McFaul consistently speaks supportively of extreme right-wing economic policies in these two texts. In his memoir, recalling the post-Soviet fire sale of state assets, he “tended to side with the shock therapists” and blamed the Russian state for simply bungling the transition into capitalism.
In his own description of his ambassadorial duties, McFaul writes:
I did all I could to lobby on behalf of American companies…At first these activities seemed strange to me. Marx was right, I thought. The state is an instrument of capitalism! But this trade and investment would support hundreds of jobs back in the United States. Unlike many other aspects of ambassadorial work, these economic outcomes felt very tangible.
McFaul’s treatment of the Yeltsin years further exemplifies this tendency: “During the 1990s Yeltsin’s government welcomed US advisers in almost every facet of economic and political reform. US advisers even had offices in some of Russia’s most important government ministries and agencies.”
Sidestepping whether or not this is normal in a sovereign country, no less a democratic one, he goes on to claim that “Yeltsin and his entourage picked Putin as a successor to maintain continuity with existing political and economic practices, including the protection of property rights of those who had become wealthy during the Yeltsin era.” This tortured syntax could have been spared had McFaul simply used the word “oligarch.”
In his article McFaul positively cites Putin’s institution of a flat income tax, lower corporate taxes, and a commitment to property rights. He goes on, with great disappointment, to catalogue how far Putin has fallen as an economic manager:
Over time, however, Putin grew more suspicious of private economic actors, both foreign and domestic. He redistributed property rights away from the 1990s-era ‘oligarchs’ and placed KGB loyalists and his St. Petersburg friends in the leadership of major state-owned enterprises….Increased state ownership, a redistribution of property rights guided by political motivation, and a system of patronage have resulted in economic stagnation. As an alibi for Russia’s economic woes, Putin increasingly has blamed ideological enemies, at home and abroad.
McFaul doesn’t consider the initial distribution to oligarchs “political” (nor does he provide citations for his economic claims). The image of a Russian leader surrounded by people dependent on him for their prosperity neatly mirrors the precarious end of the Yeltsin tenure.
The Ambassador doesn’t entertain that Putin may have seen first-hand a strong, centralized state can endure, while a more fractious distribution of power can lead to instability and chaos. For McFaul, who presents himself as beyond partisanship, Putin’s ideology explains everything, and experience explains nothing.
Authoritarianism
Most of the attention paid to Putin in the Western media, at least before 2014, had to do with a reassertion of “traditional” values: oppression of women and sexual minorities. McFaul talks about these policies as manifestations of Putin’s “illiberal” beliefs, values so strong that he allies with like-minded figures inside other countries. While this is also true of US organizations and doubtless of post-colonial relationships elsewhere in the world, there is a much simpler explanation: authoritarianism, tout court.
Studies have shown that approximately one-third of people around the world are sympathetic to authoritarianism, a tendency that can be awakened during times of much-derided “economic uncertainty.” In fact, none other than then-candidate Barack Obama accurately diagnosed this psychological tendency in 2008. McFaul is clear that Putin did not begin his political career as a reactionary when it came to social policy, so what explains this turn?
All signs point to Vova the Dread counting on the authoritarian faction of the populace to cement his hold on power, much like leaders have done and are doing around the world, regardless of ideological commitment to any of the rhetoric or policy. Survival, political or otherwise is the aim, no more, no less. In The Means of Reproduction Michelle Goldberg shows how even purportedly leftist leaders resort to appeals to religion and patriarchy when their power is threatened.
These invocations of tradition, order, and a daddy-state work when people feel besieged and disempowered. Whether threats to some perceived normalcy are real or not isn’t relevant. It’s curious that McFaul doesn’t seem familiar with the social science around this trend because it explains perfectly Putin’s domestic tilt to the right, much like it explains every fear-addled Republican National Convention broadcast since at least 1992.
McFaul also neglects to mention popular opinion or material conditions during the different periods he analyzes. According to the Levada Center, often cited as an independent source of data, Putin’s popularity has never dipped below 50%. It seems like an oversight for someone who claims to be committed to democracy not to share what the citizens of the country in question think.
In his Stimson Lectures at Yale, John Mearshimer, the bête noire of liberal theorists, asserted that an inconvenient truth of politics is that people prefer stability to “democracy.” Russia, having experienced state collapse and economic chaos in the name of said reforms, exemplifies this fact.
Levels of Analysis
McFaul does not consider the purpose of states at the level of international relations. If one accepts that the US functions as an agent of a specific type of neoliberal capitalism, safeguards and imposes it with violence, sometimes accompanied by millenarian Christian thinking, many bizarre actions make much more sense.
The same cannot be said of Russia.
Former Ukraininan President Viktor Yushchenko, describing Russian aims and policy, called them “medieval,” which suggests far more modest aims: the consolidation of power for the powerful and the preservation of the state to ensure that. No more, no less.
Reading McFaul is not a fruitless exercise.
The real utility, though, lies in what’s unsaid — that American policy is benevolent, that neoliberalism is good, and that the rest of the world simply needs to catch up with the American way of life. These omissions serve as a primer on the standard ideology in the American foreign policy community.
McFaul’s writing tells you a lot about the American liberal mindset but not very much about Russia.
