War of the Worlds: Michael McFaul on Russia and Ukraine

"I think we’re underestimating what a cataclysmic event it will be if Putin goes in big."

GEOPOLITICS

---

Early this morning, after months of anxious speculation, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Signs of war had been growing by the day. Earlier this week, Russian President Vladimir Putin recognized the sovereignty of Donetsk and Luhansk, Ukraine’s two breakaway regions, and ordered Russian troops into the area. Then U.S. President Joe Biden denounced the move, imposed new sanctions, and sent more troops to Eastern Europe. Ukraine declared a state of emergency and mobilized its reserves. And then Putin struck, launching missile attacks across Ukraine and invading on multiple fronts. To help understand what’s happening and anticipate what comes next, I turned to the American who arguably knows Putin better than any other: Michael McFaul. An academic and author now based at Stanford, McFaul served as U.S. ambassador to Russia from 2012-2014. We spoke yesterday—on the eve of Russia’s attack—about Putin’s mindset, the consequences of war, and what the West can do about it.

Octavian Report: You know Putin as well as any American; what do you think his real objectives are here? You’ve written that it’s not about preventing Ukraine from joining NATO. So what do you think he’s really after?

McFaul: I would say a couple of things. First, there’s a misconception in the West that he’s just a gangster running a criminal state and it’s all a cost-benefit analysis for him. Now, there are elements of the way he rules and the way he lives that are like that, but that’s not the whole story.

The bigger story is that Putin’s an ideologue. He has an ideology and a set of convictions that motivate him that aren’t just about his own personal material interests, or even Russia’s security interests. After all, launching an invasion of Ukraine would be a very risky operation. If it goes south, it could really damage his place in history. When leaders do things like that, you need to look at their ideas and worldview.

In the case of Putin, I think there are three or four central tenets to his thinking. One: the American-dominated liberal international order was dictated to a weak Russia 30 years ago in a way that Putin thinks was unjust. Two: he wants to propagate his ideology. It’s a mix of anti-multilateralism and nationalist, populist, and Orthodox values. During his first decade in power, he spent most of his time promoting those ideas inside Russia. But during his second decade in power, he spent a lot of money and resources and time exporting those ideas. I don’t think we paid enough attention to that. He did it, and does it, through the Russia Today TV network and the Sputnik news agency. He does it through NGOs. He does it through the church. He does it through disinformation to undermine democratic ideas. Over time, he’s achieved some successes. He has Viktor Orbán in Hungry, Matteo Salvini in Italy, Marine Le Pen in France, and Donald Trump in the United States: people who are ideologically closer to Putin than they are to the President of the United States today. So that’s a second piece of what he’s after, and he wants Ukraine to adhere to that worldview.

Finally, there’s Ukraine itself. If you’re an autocrat with illiberal views, liberal democracy threatens you. He sees that the United States propagates liberal democratic ideas, and those threaten him. And by the way, there’s reason for him to believe that. Liberal democratic ideas do threaten his legitimacy at home. Sometimes Americans say, “Well, we haven’t done anything against him.” Actually, our very existence as a democracy is a threat to him. And democracy is especially a threat when it’s practiced by a people in a nation like Ukraine with a common history and culture and religious and family ties with Russia. That is the central drama animating Putin today.

OR: Given all that, and the fact that Ukraine seems nonetheless determined to move in a Western and democratic direction, is there anything that Biden could offer—or any threat he could make or any punishment he could impose—that would get Putin to back down and leave Ukraine and the other former Soviets states alone?

McFaul: I don’t think so. You have to understand that what I just described as Putin’s worldview hasn’t been a constant. It’s changed over time. The guy I first met in 1991 didn’t think like that. When he became president in 2000, he said very different things, including about Ukraine’s right to join NATO. It’s only when the so-called color revolutions happened—in Serbia in 2000, in Georgia in 2003, in Ukraine 2004—that he changed. So merely promising that Ukraine won’t join NATO wouldn’t be sufficient to appease him. Besides, you can’t tell a people who are fighting for freedom and democracy, “Hey, wait a minute. Can you stop doing that so we can make an agreement with Russia?” So I’m not optimistic that there could have been a negotiated deal.

I do think in retrospect—and this predates Biden—that had the United States and other democracies leaned in more heavily to support economic reform and democracy, and to provide security assistance to Ukraine, that that would’ve raised the cost for what appears to be an impending invasion. But it’s too late for that. In the last few weeks, I think the Biden team has had very weak cards in their hands but have played them as well as they could have.

OR: If Russia can’t be deterred or persuaded to leave its neighbors alone, do we need to go back to Cold War‑style containment? What would that look like today?

McFaul: A few years ago, I published a book called From Cold War to Hot Peace in which I used that phrase “hot peace” to echo the Cold War but also suggest that things are slightly different now. Sometimes people say, “Well, we don’t want to go back to the Cold War, do we?” I remind them that some things are actually scarier today than they were then. Russia didn’t go around annexing places during the Cold War; that ended in 1945, and we constructed a world system that tried to prevent that. Now it’s back.

But yes, we need to deter Russia’s belligerent behavior as best we can while avoiding a conventional conflict, just as we did during the Cold War. And we’ve got to understand that this is an ideological struggle. So many Americans think that this is not about ideology. I disagree. We’ve been very lackadaisical about the need to support basic truth and information and promote liberalism and democracy.

We should also look for areas where our interests overlap and find ways to cooperate on those. We figured out how to do that during the Cold War: we would engage on some things and we would contain on others. Tragically, I think we have to return to that kind of strategy today.

OR: Let’s say that Russia does fully occupy Ukraine. What do you think the geopolitical impact will be? A few days ago, Robert Kagan sketched out a very dire future in which the West and Russia come into conflict all along the borderlands of Eastern Europe. Do you think that’s where we’re headed?

McFaul: I don’t know, and I want to emphasize the fact that I don’t know because I want people to think about what they don’t know. History shows that leaders often promise that wars will be short and successful and contained. And those predictions are often proven wrong. Just think of World War I, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq.

So I think we need to begin to prepare ourselves for the fact that this might not be a short little war contained in an easy way for Vladimir Putin. You mentioned occupation. I don’t think the Russians have the capability or the forces to occupy Ukraine. If they try, it will get very messy. The Ukrainians are going to fight. There’s going to be a guerrilla war.

With respect to the rest of the region, I find it hard to believe that Putin would attack a NATO country. I listen to him pretty closely when he talks about recreating the Soviet empire, and he does not mention the Baltic states [which are now NATO members]. I think he is prone to very risky behavior right now, because he’s had a run of winning wars and that’s emboldened him. But I would be very surprised if he intentionally crossed into and attacked a NATO ally.

OR: Do you think the Russian people will support a war if thousands of young Russian men start coming home in body bags?

McFaul: Polling’s very hard in Russia, and I’m on the Russian sanctions list so I haven’t been able to travel there since 2014. But I did spend six or seven years of my life in the country, and I interact with Russians pretty much every day on various platforms. At least among the elites, I don’t see any enthusiasm for this war.

That’s part of the reason Putin had to spend over an hour on his speech a few days ago trying to explain it. As I tell my students, if you need an hour to explain your argument, it means you don’t have a very good argument. In this case, there’s a fundamental contradiction in what Putin’s saying. On the one hand, he’s saying the Ukrainians are the closest people in the world to us; in his view, they’re just Russians with an accent, and they should be integrated into Russia. Yet at the same time, he’s now attacking them. I think that’s hard for Russians to understand. Putin wants to create this fiction that NATO is coming and it’s going to threaten Russia. The Russians I talk to are like “Really? We’re mighty Russia and the idea of NATO membership for Ukraine years in the future threatens us?” So he’s got a story problem, which will be exacerbated if there are major casualties.

OR: Let’s go back to the notion you raised a minute ago about cooperating where there are shared interests. Describe the “Helsinki 2.0” plan you laid out a few weeks ago.

McFaul: If Putin and the Russian government are serious about wanting to negotiate with the United States and our European allies and partners, there’s a lot to talk about. And my idea was, if we do that, don’t go small—go big. By making the agenda bigger, we can avoid getting stuck on the most extreme positions where we disagree. The first Helsinki Final Act was in 1975. It was the product of a very complicated negotiation. It took three years, I think, to get it signed. It covered codifying the borders from World War II. It talked about economic cooperation, and it talked about human rights. It was a set of deals made with the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War.

It then led to several other arms control and transparency agreements that were security-enhancing. So if Putin really wanted to negotiate, we could create a similar agenda that would serve everyone’s interests.

The last thing I’ll say about Helsinki is that there’s language in there that everybody understood in different ways. Sometimes diplomacy requires purposeful ambiguity; sometimes it’s necessary to fudge. If Putin wanted to negotiate, that would be a way that we could handle some of our maximalist positions—his about rolling back NATO expansion, ours about the annexation of Crimea. That was the idea, but it takes two to tango, and I just don’t see that Putin’s interested in a grand bargain covering European security right now.

OR: Is there anything important that most analysts are missing about the crisis or Putin right now?

McFaul: I think there’s a tendency among strategists and international-relations theorists and foreign-policy makers to assume that states rationally seek to pursue their interests. Among many other things, that leads people to say, “Why don’t we just close the NATO door, and then we’ll have peace?” The problem with that view is that it misses the role of individuals, the role of regime type. Imagine if Russia were a democracy instead of a dictatorship. The oligarchs who were just sanctioned would be at the Duma [Russia’s parliament] right now lobbying Putin, saying, “Hey, we don’t want to do this.” Power is the central driver of all world politics, and the balance of power is the most important element—but that’s not the whole explanation. If you discount the role of leaders, regimes, and ideas, you don’t get the full story.

OR: What do you think the most likely outcome of this crisis is going to be?

McFaul: I want to be wrong, but I fear there’s going to be a major war. Tens of thousands of people will die. It will not be a convincing victory. It’ll be a protracted occupation. I think we’re underestimating what a cataclysmic event it will be if he goes in big—not just for Ukraine but for Europe, for the way we think about our interests in the world, for our relationship with China. And I think it’ll be the defining event of the Putin era—and if it goes badly, it will have bad consequences for the stability of his regime.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.