Putin vs the US ‘reset’
In May 2012, the American ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, accompanied a senior White House official to a meeting with Vladimir V Putin at the then-president-elect’s country estate. Midway through the discussion, Putin turned directly to McFaul and berated him for trying to ruin United States-Russia relations. In From Cold War to Hot Peace, McFaul recalls wondering, “Why was one of the most powerful men on the planet so obsessed with an American diplomat?”
McFaul answers his own question in these pages. In 2008, he joined Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and was later appointed senior director for Russian affairs at the National Security Council before serving as ambassador in Moscow from 2012 to 2014. McFaul combines both analytical and personal perspectives to offer a fascinating and timely account of the current crisis in the relationship between Russia and the United States.
In the wake of Russia’s 2008 war with Georgia, the Obama administration attempted to reboot relations with the Kremlin. McFaul was the author of what became known as the “Reset,” and so his narrative pitches the reader deep into the flurry of briefing documents, negotiations, handshakes and treaties that were calculated to draw Russia closer to the orbit of Western agendas and values. He emphasises that the personal chemistry between the two new presidents, Obama and Dmitri A Medvedev, drove forward a range of policies, from nuclear disarmament to efforts to deny Iran the bomb, with tangible success.
The dramatic pivot in McFaul’s story comes in late 2011, when relations between Russia and the United States quickly soured. The primary cause was, McFaul maintains, Russian domestic politics. Putin’s earlier terms as president had been underpinned by a social compact in which the Kremlin offered rising living standards in exchange for political support or at least acquiescence. By 2011 under Medvedev, as the fallout from the financial crisis hit Russia hard, that deal was beginning to unravel.
In September, many educated Russians became indignant at the news of a “castling move,” in which Medvedev and Putin announced they would swap positions of president and prime minister. Mass demonstrations against voter fraud in the December parliamentary elections thronged Russian cities and spooked the Kremlin. With the presidential vote looming in March 2012, Putin cast around for enemies at home and abroad to revalidate himself as defender of the Russian people.
The newly minted American ambassador was the perfect fall guy for the Kremlin — manna from heaven for Putin’s election effort, as one senior Russian official put it. Here was a diplomat with a long history of personally supporting democratic movements in Russia and the author, no less, of a book entitled “Russia’s Unfinished Revolution.”
The Kremlin subjected McFaul and his embassy staff to harassment and vitriol that tore up the conventions of international diplomacy. A fake Twitter account purporting to belong to the ambassador tweeted out criticisms of the Russian elections; videos circulated on YouTube suggesting he was a pedophile; agents of the pro-Kremlin youth organisation Nashi repeatedly ambushed McFaul in the street with accusations and innuendo; even his children were obtrusively tailed by the Russian security services.
McFaul did his best to swim against this tide of official hostility. He took to Twitter and Facebook in an attempt to communicate directly with the Russian people, an unorthodox approach that enjoyed, he claims, some success, but ruffled feathers in Moscow. He hosted receptions, concerts and lectures designed to champion not just American culture but also wider respect for democratic values. “Our tweets and jazz concerts were no match,” McFaul acknowledges, for Putin’s “media empire.”
McFaul believed that this flagrant breach of international norms was proof that his own lifelong endeavour to promote democracy in Russia and secure integration with the West had emphatically failed. His personal tragedy was capped by the fact that he is now persona non grata in Russia, the first American ambassador to have been banned from the country since George Kennan in 1952.
Putin is clearly the villain in this story. He makes his case with energy and conviction. Yet his relentless focus on Putin’s individual role tends to obscure the broader evolution of attitudes toward the West within the Russian political establishment. There are, for instance, only passing references to the siloviki — hard-liners with a background in the security services who were all along uneasy about Medvedev’s embrace of the Reset. In fact, Putin is far from alone in his hostility to what he sees as aggressive NATO expansionism and the threat of American missile defence programs.
And what of wider public opinion? McFaul concedes that Putin’s popularity “suggests a deep societal demand for this kind of autocratic leader, and this kind of antagonistic relationship with the United States and the West.” But instead of developing this insight, McFaul leaves it hanging.
Placing responsibility for the rapid deterioration in United States-Russian relations squarely on the shoulders of the Russian president has its appeal. It holds out the promise that Kremlin policy toward the West might pivot once again when Putin finally retires or is pushed out. Maybe so, but the more pessimistic view is that Putin represents a now-entrenched revanchist nationalism that sees the liberal international order as a mere smokescreen for the advancement of Western political agendas. As McFaul himself laments, “the hot peace, tragically but perhaps necessarily, seems here to stay.”