Pod Save the World - Of Russia with Love with Mike McFaul

Episode Date: March 8, 2017

Tommy and former US Ambassador to Russia Mike McFaul talk about the US-Russia relationship. We cover pop culture and Rocky IV, arms control, Russian harassment of US diplomats, Mike’s assessment of Putin’s leadership and when relations turned bad, if Romney was right to call Russia our number one geopolitical foe and the lessons America can learn from Putin’s rise.

Welcome back to Pod Save the World. Thank you to everyone who has subscribed, who has shared it on social media, like the tweets, who's given us a five-star review. I appreciate it. My guest this week is former ambassador, U.S. ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul. Mike was a colleague of mine in the White House. He was on the National Security Council. He is now at Stanford University.

He's a brilliant guy. What we did is a couple weeks ago, we sat down and we just talked through the history of the U.S. Russia relationship. Arms control, Obama's accomplishments, where we made. have failed. You really try to dig into this because I think what's lost in this conversation about Trump and Russia is not whether or not they had meetings or have ties that are untoward is what is the nature of this relationship? Why is it important? What are our concerns about Vladimir Putin and the way Trump team is approaching this? So I think you'll enjoy it. I really appreciate you guys listening and talk to you soon. All right, I'm here with Mike McFaul, the director of the Freeman

Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. Mike was an early advisor to then Senator Obama's presidential campaign. He then went on to work at the White House. For you. As a special assistant to the president and senior director for Russia in Eurasian Affairs, and then in 2011, Obama tapped him to be the U.S. ambassador to Russia. Not bad for a kid from small town, Montana. Yeah?

Those were glory years. Those were great days. Those were glory years. Mike, thank you for being here. Yeah. Thank you for coming to Stanford. I mean, this place is magnificent. I would like to find myself at 16 and shake him and say,

go to Stanford. So if you're listening, go to Stanford. This is the future, baby. This is the 21st century. They're the other universities that had their day. They're fine. They're fine. California.

You spent time in Russia as a student studying at Leningrad State University. I believe they made the NCAA tournament a couple of times. What was it like being a student in Russia during the Cold War? And was that what made you want to do this lifelong journey of studying Russia? So my interest in the Soviet Union, as it was called back then, I actually started in high school in Bozeman, Montana. That's where I finished high school. I was looking for an easy English credit, and I'd just moved there.

I moved from a town called Butte. So I was the new kid on the block as a junior in high school. And my neighbor said, take debate. That's the easy way to get an English credit. And the debate topic that year was improving U.S. trade policy. By the way, it could be this year's, should be this year's. And my debate partner, we were both rookies. he's now a senator, Senator Steve Daines from Montana.

We picked the topic to increase trade to the Soviet Union. So that was our debate case, as they're called back then. And so a year and a half later, when I landed here, literally here, as a 17-year-old kid, I had this interest in the Soviet Union. I took my fall quarter of my freshman year introductory to Russian and introductory to international relations. And since then, in different incarnations, I've been interested in that relationship. I mean, back then, that was the height of the Cold War. I was freaked out by Ronald Reagan.

I thought he was going to start another war, you know, World War III. And my theory as a kid, growing up in Montana, was if we could just understand them better, talk to them, we could reduce tensions. And to get back to Leningrad State University, I had never been abroad in my entire life. at that point. I had only been across the Mississippi, east of the Mississippi once in my life. And that summer, imagine my mother in Montana when I said, hey, Mom, I'm going to the evil empire for the summer. But I did. And, you know, that was my first time abroad. And it had an appeal to me, both communism and the international relations piece, but then eventually the Russia piece too. I did not know that whole story. That is very cool. and a good path for any 18-year-olds listening who want to get in your field.

So I'm going to preface by saying this is a silly or maybe even stupid question. This is an old podcaster trick. You tell your audience, your question is dumb, so they skip ahead. But there's so many pieces of pop culture with a Russian enemy, right? There's Rocky Four. There's Hunt for Red Oxhub, there's Miracle. Do you think that's a reflection of tensions that existed or exacerbate them? It's not a stupid question.

It's a question that drives Russians crazy, by the way, they see this and and I remember going, what movie was it when I was ambassador? One of the great things you get to do as ambassadors, you get to go to openings of American movies and you're part of the VIP team. And I think it was Men in Black Three in fact. And there's a Russian character in that. And all around me, I could tell people we're cringing about it. Like here we are again as the bad guy. But you're asking a big social science question, right? Is it a cause or a consequence? And I think it's obviously, like all these things, it's a bit of both. There was a period when the Russians were good people for us and we like them.

By the way, in the 90s, there was a soft power a lot through sports, by the way, where Russians came and we love them, you know, we love a Vetchkin and now we love Moskhov here in California, at least those in the South. But we're also back to where Russia is the enemy again. And, you know, in Hollywood is just easy, you know, like people understand it. They know it. You know, the terrorists and the Russians. But it doesn't help the cause in terms of, you know, relations between our peoples, not between our states.

Okay. So you ran Russia policy at the White House at a time when it felt a lot more. That's called Gromkaskasana in Russian, which means that's overstated. But anyway. You were a big cheese at the White House on Russia policy at a time when things felt a lot more hopeful. Yeah, it was great. Yeah, Obama came in. He wanted to reset Russia policy, right?

And it's funny now a Republican's attacked him at the time. Never mind that every president since the Cold War had essentially said the same thing. And now Donald Trump is saying essentially the same thing. But I'm wondering if you could explain. Incredible flip-flop. It was Republicans that used to beat me up and beat our former boss up about how he's too soft and how they all love Russia. But anyway, it's not your question. Where are you, John McCain?

I'm wondering if you explain to what the reset meant to you guys then and why it was important. Yeah. Well, so we came in together, right? I started January 21st, 2009 at the White House. And it was a, you know, I don't know how you remember it, but it was an incredible time. I was super excited to be part of the new Obama administration. And in my AOR, as we called it, right, area responsibility, trying to figure out a way to cooperate with Russia, not for the goal of cooperation, which I think is something Trump gets wrong, but in places that would. help us defend and pursue our national interests. That was what the president wanted us to do. And we had a great run. We actually did a lot of really big things, as he likes to say, big deals that were good for America. You know, we signed the new start treaty, flew to Prague to do that. That was a great trip. 2010, bringing down the ceiling by 30% of nuclear weapons in the world. and I like to joke when I'm around here.

Like, what did you do in 2010? That's what I did. But we got sanctions on Iran. Don't forget, that was critical that the Russians were with us, North Korea. We opened up a supply route. A lot of people don't know much about this. It's called the Northern Distribution Network.

And when you and I joined the government, just a trickle of our supplies, went through this northern route through Russia, through Central Asia, into Afghanistan to supply our soldiers there. By the time I'd love, left the White House, it was over 50% of our supplies and our soldiers went through that route. In fact, 95% of all of our soldiers flew through that route through a country called Kyrgyzstan and the

Manaz Air Base. And that gave us the ability to not be dependent on Pakistan for supply routes. And that was really consequential one day in 2011 when we went after and killed Osama bin Laden. And so very concrete. Like the Russians were helping us against some of the biggest things that you and I were tackling at that time. And it was, you know, in some ways now that I'm writing, I'm writing a book about it. So invite me back when I get my book done. Absolutely. And, you know, I'm looking at other periods of history.

This was one of the most consequential periods in terms of U.S. Russian relations, you know, for decades. Yeah. And then it all ended tragically. Oh, I know. Well, I love to. I want to dig into all these things. because there's such big issues. I mean, there is this amazing picture of you

in the Oval Office with President Obama, and you've got, like, the Kennedy clan hair flowing and the huge binder. And the photo was so good that the New Republic stole your body, animated it, and replaced it with Rahm Emanuel's head, which is bullshit, by the way. But the thing I love about that picture

is Barack Obama looks so pissed off. Yeah. And I'm wondering if you could explain what you guys were doing and why he was so angry. I think that's the most, angry I've ever seen him. Actually, one other time, but that was early on. That was in the beginning. I'll tell you exactly what happened. So we're negotiating the New Star Treaty, and we want to bring

down the numbers of offensive nuclear weapons, right? And the Russians say, we don't want to go too far down because you have missile defense. And we want constraints on your missile defense. So you won't shoot down our rockets and win a nuclear war. They would say things like that. The president would roll his eyes to think who could be so crazy to think about. that, but those were the negotiations. And we were militantly against any limitations on our missile defense systems, partly because we didn't, we saw these things as apples and oranges, but partly because Republicans would have never ratified the treaty had we put any constraints in. So that morning, you know, we're going in for a call. Pre-brief, you remember that acronym?

Or not acronym, but whatever, phrase from the White House. Awful NSD phrase that only we used. Pre-brief. So we're rolling into that. the pre-brief for this call with President Medvedev. That's who he's on the phone with. And I stopped by the situation room to pick up, you know, cables that had come in over the evening. But I didn't look at them because I'm getting ready for a very important briefing with the president about the start treaty, right? We were trying to close the deal that day. And so we're sitting there and I'm going to speak a little cryptically because not everything's been declassified yet. I'm still in the

process of doing that. But basically Medvedev was saying on the other side, you know, in that phone call, you know, thank you very much, Mr. President, for your, you know, concessions about missile defense. And we're all looking at each other. Like, you know, it's not in his briefing points. He's got the phone up in the air. You know, I'm on the phone just for listeners, so you know how this works. I speak Russian, right? So I'm on the other phone sitting on the couch listening so I can hear in the Oval Office. So I can hear both the Russian and the translation to try to figure out what's going on. And finally, I figured out what Medvedev was saying. And I basically had to, in my second grade scribbling and my handwriting in that notebook that you talk about in that photo,

to write out a note to the president to say, we can't accept that deal. You have to say no. And so that's what he's doing when that photo was taken. And Medvedev said, well, we don't have a deal then. We're dumb. and we're not going to do this deal. And it felt at that moment like the whole thing's been blown up in our face. So he hangs up.

Obviously, there had been a garble between our diplomats about what they had heard and what we could do, right? That's what Medvedev was referring to. And the president, I remember very vividly, he, like, walked out of the room. He was late. He was late because Rahm Emanuel was waiting for him. Rahm was always pissed at me. And Gary Seymour, remember Gary? Because we were the start guys.

we're taking up too much time away from ObamaCare. Anyway, he like marches out of the room and he turns to us, Tom Donnellan and I, then the Deputy National Security Advisor, and he said, people have to be held accountable for their mistakes. And he walked out. And so I then, 10 minutes later... I thought Tom loved that. Well, I wandered down to Tom's office, you know, but then it was a closet, remember?

That's where the Deputy National Security Advisor sits. one of the most powerful people in the U.S. government sits in a closet. And I said, you know, Tom, you must see that all the time. But I've never seen that before. And he said, Mike, I've never seen that before. But all as well, that ends well. We got the treaty done. We got it ratified and everybody was happy.

And then we drank champagne in the Oval Office later. You're listening to POD Save the World. Stick around. There's more great show coming your way. This is one of these issues where I feel like if you don't know the history of it, first or top priorities coming to, office was nuclear nonproliferation, which is one of the worst pieces of jargon in foreign policy, but it basically just means you wanted to reduce the number of nuclear weapons of the world.

And I saw a chart that showed at the height of the Cold War at one point, the U.S. had 30,000 nuclear warheads at one point, and Russia had over 40,000 nuclear warheads. And I guess my question for you is, what the fuck, man, like, how many times can you nuke a city? Why did we have so many nuclear weapons? Because there was always this first strike, second strike fear. and that's how it just got out of hand, which was to say that you didn't want the other side to be tempted to do a first strike, obviously, right, and not have the capability to strike back. And so in that paranoia, that's when those numbers just went out of control. Now, over time, we got the number just by comparison in the New START Treaty, the number now is 1550.

So we've come way, way down from the height of the Cold War. And part of the reason we can do that is that those missiles are more secure now from a first strike. They're on submarines, for instance, right? So they're less likely to be taken out in a first strike. But we got a long ways to go. And I know that the president wanted to go to lower numbers. We had hoped to. We had plans to negotiate lower numbers after re-election.

And then the reset ended, not because we changed anything. We literally changed nothing in our policy. It was Putin coming back to power and deciding he didn't want to engage with us anymore. Right. I mean, so thanks to dozens of calls, like the one in that photo, Obama and Medvedev were able to announce the New Star Treaty an event in Prague. And I have some vivid memories of that, of that trip. The first is of President Obama delivering that speech near Prague Castle about, you know, a nuclear free world. And I remember the press riser was up sort of by the stage where he was.

and I don't want to sound cheesy, but like, when you look over tens of thousands of Europeans cheering back at a president who's talking about a nuclear free world, like that is the greatness of America reflected back of you, right? And all the hope and our values and all that we stand for. I mean, it gave me chills at the times and it still does.

The second thing I remember was I got lost in Prague Castle and I was trying to find you guys and I was sprinting around the corner, blackbearing away like an idiot, and I nearly drilled to me Matthew Medvedev, who is coming towards me and his security guy almost shot me. A couple of things.

One, that guy can dress. He was wearing like a tailored purple suit. He looked like a not, huge knot. He looked like a Russian prince of the singer. But my question I think is, how much of the reset do you attribute to Medvedev's leadership and willingness to be more reasonable and reach the West? Was Putin calling the shots and letting the stuff go, or how do you think that played out? Big hard question.

Yeah. There's no doubt in my mind, as I write about it and reflect on it for this book, that Medvedev, because he was a younger guy, was a lawyer, you know, kind of Obama's contemporary. In fact, the first time they met in London in April 2009, he went out of his way to say, you know, I've read the Harvard Law Review. Like, I know your work, Mr. President. And he wanted the reset to work. There's no doubt about it. And he believed in the theory of win-win outcomes. It can be good for Russia.

It can be good for the United States. It need not be zero-sum. All through that period, of course, Putin is the prime minister, lingering in the background. And we're all trying to judge where is he at? You know, we met with him when we went to Moscow in July 2009. The president had a three-hour meeting with him. I thought it was pretty successful. But we didn't have much face time with him because of the structure of their government, right?

You only talk to one president. You don't talk to two. We tried some funky things to try to connect with him over the years, and we never knew as much about him as we knew about Medvedev. I would say in retrospect, two things. So September 2011, that's when we learned that Medvedev decided that he was going to step aside and let Putin run for a third term as president, right? And I remember I saw the president around that time in the Oval Office, and we talked about it. And he asked me what I thought. And I said, well, you know, it's a shame because you've developed this personal rapport with this guy. And we got a lot of things done. And now that capital has been reduced. But remember, Putin was there for all of those other decisions. I mean, he ratified the start treaty. He supported the sanctions. WTO accession, world trade organization. We got Russia into the world trade organization. Might not sound like a big deal, but it took 18 years before us. Three administrations failed. And we got it done.

Right. And that was wrong for two reasons. One is over time in our interactions with Putin, we learn that he doesn't think in win-win outcomes. By the way, that's a phrase that President Obama used to love to use, win-win outcomes. He said it in Prague in the signing of that treaty. Putin thinks in zero some terms, especially about us. And he thinks we're out to get him. And he thinks we're out to undermine him.

And he thinks we use American power, covert and overt. to undermine regimes that we don't like. Ironical. And guess what? There's a lot of historical evidence to support that hypothesis, right? And so Obama over the years tried to say, hey, I'm different.

I'm not like those other guys. I remember the first time they met, Putin went on this long tirade about how stupid the Iraq war was. And at the end, the president said two words. I agree. And he was kind of shocked. He said, what do you mean, you agree?

You guys did it. And he said, I didn't do it. Right. That was a bad decision. And by the way, you know, Mr. Prime Minister, I was against that war long before it started. But here's then what happened, just to speed forward a little bit. The year that Putin decides to return to the Kremlin, 2011, the same year that thousands of people took to the streets in Egypt and later in Syria, in Tunisia, Libya, that's the Arab Spring. Right? And he's looking at that. and he's blaming us for it. He's blaming the CIA. He said, you guys are overthrowing regimes. This is not good for the Middle East.

But at the end of the year, there's an election in Russia, parliamentary election. I was still working at the White House. You know, we did our analysis of it. Falseification, yeah. But, you know, kind of normal for Russia, you know, 5 or 6%. That's normal for Russia. 5% or 6% sort of falsified votes. Right.

So that the party of power, Putin's party, could win the majority in the parliament. But this time around, people had cell phones. They had Twitter, Facebook, Vokontakté, and they documented the falsification and it pissed people off. Young people, by the way, it was the young, urban, they have a phrase for it in Russian. It's the creative class. And first 5,000, then tens of thousands, and later hundreds of thousands of people came out on the streets to protest against Putin. And that's when the reset ended. because he looked at those people and he said,

these people are supported by the West. They're supported by Hillary Clinton, and that came back, you know, to haunt her. They're supported by Obama. And Obama sent McFall, as he said to me, to foment revolution. That's why he sent him here as ambassador. And that we argued till we were blue in the face

that that wasn't what we were doing. But that's kind of when the reset ended, and that's when we were in this much more adversarial relationship with him. Ben Rhodes and I were talking about this once. Obama made bets on so many foreign leaders that just didn't turn out for whatever reason, right? Like Medvedev, Lula, and Brazil. I mean, nothing, there's no relation between them. It was just, it's a story about how hard it is to conduct foreign policy in a helpful way without a partner.

Yep, very good point. Were you at that G8 at Camp David? No. You were probably in Moscow by then. I was like the last G8... Where Medvedev came. Where Medvedev came instead of Putin. Yeah.

You could tell he was just there to party. Is that right? He and his crew, they got hammered. They were out up until like two in the morning. And they tried to order, I think it was like 27 cheeseburgers from the Navy mess. 27 cheese burgers. It all kind of got trickled back to us. But yeah, it was.

Well, that's when we knew we were in trouble, you know, because right before that, Tom Donnell and then the National Security Advisor came to Moscow. I was ambassador and had a one-on-one meeting with Putin, which is really rare. And his main message was we want to keep continuity. and as part of that, he, you know, on behalf of the President of the United States invited him to come to Washington and be his guest and he was going to stay at Blair House. We were going to do all the bells and whistles for Putin. And that was going to be difficult for us politically. But that was Obama's decision. And very cryptically, Putin basically said, I'm not coming.

So the President of the United States invited him. And then he wanted him to go off to the G8, you know, after that. And that's when we knew we were in a different world. You're geeking out with me on POTSave the World. More on the way. So the clouds roll in, you get sent over to be ambassador to Moscow. I think just sort of stepping back a bit, I think people hear a lot about Putin. They hear about hacking of the election, but it's hard to get a clear picture of Putin and Russia.

Like some people just assert that he's evil. Others, you know, even what you just said makes it sound more like a governing strategy, right? That's sort of a zero-sum game that can distract. from their electoral problems that can distract from their economic failings. I'm wondering if you think there's an answer on this or where you land personally. So I think at this stage in Putin's life,

and I think that's really important to say, holding on to power is the whole game. I've met Putin in the spring of 1991. So I go way back. It's not like we're hanging out drinking beers. Is he like KGB guy then? He was the deputy mayor in St. Petersburg and the mayor at the time was a leading democratic hero of the democratic revolution.

I was there, by the way, with Walter Mondale, the former vice president as the head of a, he was then the head of a group called the National Democratic Institute. And I was working for them. And we were there to help them to start their democracy. Right. I mean, ironically, Putin was our guy I was dealing with. But what I would say, not to go all the way back, is, you know, whatever decision you made at what, at what point, now holding on the power is everything and making Russia a great power again in his definition of that, which is not my definition. I don't think his definition is right.

That's what he's doing. And, you know, he needed an enemy. It's part of rallying his base. By the way, his electoral base is a lot like Trump's base. It's almost exactly the same. And he scares them with messages about the United States. I think Trump's going to complicate that maybe a bit. But that's what he's doing. And he really can't step down because there was a big redistribution of property during the Putin era where basically his buddies now have become billionaires. One of his closest associates, for instance, is now the head of the largest oil company in Russia.

And if Putin steps down, there's no guarantee that he gets to maintain his control. of that company. So I don't think he has a choice. I think he has to stay in power for the foreseeable future. So, okay. So you get to Moscow. You became a bit of a lightning rod. Democracy advocates, younger Russians loved you. You were tweeting. You were engaged with the community, but then you were getting attacked by hardliners and news outlets connected to the government. How did you balance your role between sort of reaching out to the people and your need to have access to the government and sort of communicate with them effectively? Yeah. Well, it should be the goal and objective of all ambassadors, in my view, to engage with both the government and society. And I think our most effective ambassadors around the world, that's what they do. But at times, the ability to do that changes. And most certainly I landed right at the time that these people were all demonstrating against them, right? And in the middle of the Russian presidential election. One of the guys that was run on Putin,

campaign, old friend of mine. You know, remember, I've been going to Russia since 1983. I got, I got relationships I go way back, including in the government. And this guy said to me, hey, Mike, you are manna from heaven, baby. You know, you have arrived, you know, you're Mr. Democracy, Revolution guy, because I write about these things. Right, your books from Democracy. Yeah, I teach a course on revolutions. It doesn't mean I'm a revolutionary, right? But he said, you're perfect for us to help us in this election. And he's, and he's a good. And he said, don't take it personally. Even Medvedev said to that to me, by the way, one time.

He said, don't take it personally. And it'll all calm down after the election, right? Like we talk about our elections from time to time that way. But what that meant was I was featured on television day one. I mean, even before day one, before I'd even met with a Ministry of Foreign Affairs official, there was already a hit job on me on their national television station saying, McFall was sent here to Foment Revolution. And you were harassed and tailed by paid protesters,

intelligence officials? I don't know if we know. Both. Both. Yeah, I had this kind of circus group that would follow me around. Kind of neo-nationalist types plus TV types. Every now and then the Cossacks would show up with their big hats and their swords. You know, I understood that. But I want to get back to your harder question,

which is how do you do the government engagement in that at the same time? I had a great advantage in that I knew a lot of the senior government people before I showed up in Moscow. I mean, many people might be surprised to hear this, but ambassadors plop into country X, Y, and Z, and sometimes they don't know anybody. They don't know the language. And they don't know the leadership back in the White House, right? I had this tremendous advantage that I knew you and I knew you're, you know, you're, you know, you're, you're, you're, you know. I knew Barack Obama. I knew Barack Obama pretty well, and I knew everybody around him.

And I had interacted with a lot of these senior Russian officials in my old job, so they all knew me. Right. But it became more dangerous to see me publicly. And I would say most of my job became, you know, damage control in that period. We weren't doing anything very proactive. I think we did pretty well in that government space, but it became harder and harder because this cartoonization of me. Right.

Literally, I was a cartoon in, in posters and stuff. You know, we can post them on your website. Yes, I hope we got some of us. They're funny. So, you know, I don't want to over-dramatize it. If you ever get the chance to be

Ambassador, man. Take it. It was an awesome job. Just to be able to represent your country, United States of America, anywhere, let alone in Russia. Like, how awesome is that? My children, became way more patriotic as a result of that experience and appreciative.

Now they're a little nervous, by the way, but it was a real great experience for them. And the other thing, I don't think people understand about being ambassador. It's an incredibly diversified portfolio. So, you know, one day you're over at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs arguing about Syria. But then the next day, you're at Google, because Google's got an officer. They're one of your constituents. So I had all of these meetings with American business people that Boeing, I mean, eBay, everybody. We talked about, I mentioned Timothy Mosgoff, right, this NBA player.

He came to my house. The entire NBA came to my house, his ambassador. They haven't visited me here in Falawata lately. You know, Herbie Hancock, a jazz musician, your job is to invite 700 of your closest friends to have Herbie Hancock play in your house. Sounds pretty good. It's pretty awesome. I mean, that's incredible. And I assume as an ambassador and as American official, you're probably more insulated.

I guess I was just listening to an interview recently with the former Guardian reporter named Luke Harding, who was just talking about his experience reporting over there. And they said, you know, I know that Russian officials, like, I remember Ben Rhodes came back to a hotel in Moscow, I believe, and some intel guy was kind of going through his stuff and they wanted him to see that, right? So there's lower level harassment. But this reporter was saying they cut to central heating in winter. They left his, they busted open the window by his six-year-old son's bedroom on like the third floor. Is this just mind games?

I mean, what's the value in any of this activity? Well, you know, unfortunately, those kinds of things happened. There was a big spike right at the time that I got there. I mean, talking to the old hands that worked on my team at the embassy, people had done two or three and sometimes four tours of duty in the Soviet Union and Russia. they had never experienced the kind of harassment that we were under then. And then there was an even bigger spike after Russia went into Ukraine in 2014, talking to people back there. So much so that one of Obama's last acts was in part the sanctions and the kicking out of Russian diplomats was in response to the harassment of our diplomats there. So when I hear them disparaged as, you know, bureaucrats as was happened recently by the Trump administration,

I want people to know that those people are really, they're serving their country under a lot of hardship to defend America's national interest. And I had it too. I had all those things that you live in, when you're in Russia, you're in the most surveilled country probably on the planet. I mean, maybe North Korea, but their technical capabilities far exceed what the North Koreans can do. And as your story about roads implies if they want to follow you in Russia, they can do it without you knowing. They can get in, and virtually, you know, in the cyber world and the physical world. Every now and then they make mistakes, but they're really, really good at it. And that's all I'm going to say. Right. I want to violate the law. Yeah, yeah, of course.

But every now and then, they want you to know that they're doing it. And because that causes, that's a psychological thing. Right. So they break into people's apartments and move things around. You know, they slash tires. They follow us to my kids' soccer game, just to put that psychological pressure. And that's the way they roll. Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people learned a new word this year, a compromise, I believe. Yes. Old word in Russian.

Yeah, Russian term for gathering and potentially releasing compromising materials about a public figure. This allegedly happened to Donald Trump. I don't want to get into the details because we have no idea if they're true. And I feel like he deserves the benefit of the doubt in some way. So do I. You know, I'm wondering if this is something going in your briefed on. and you brief your staff on. And you say, be extra careful for this tour of duty, young men. That's exactly what we do.

Yeah. Especially with the young men. But there's a different set of rules working in the Moscow embassy than any other place in the world. And we brief visiting members of Congress as well when they come in. We go to extraordinary lengths to protect people. When we traveled with the president, and I've seen the photo on. and the internet, so I feel free to talk about it, we built a submarine-like structure that inside one of the suites at the hotel

so that we could have a private conversation with him. I mean, you know how we used to travel with the blue tents and all that. With the blue tents and the noise machines. And the noise machines. This is kind of cool. When you travel abroad with president, he has to get intelligence briefings, the NSE staff has to do their work. He has to read the PDB.

So they literally get hotel rooms. They build tents within them. so no cameras can see there are sound machines to prevent audio recording. It is an impressive setup. Incredible. But in Russia, we go one more step. We build this submarine with these giant thick walls because their capabilities are so much better than the rest of the world. Moving to Trump, what do you make of his relationship with Putin, his refusal to criticize him? It's hard to tell if this is some existential threat to the country or just a political convenience in the wake of an election.

To be honest, I don't know. I think it's too early to tell. It's crystal clear to me why Putin supports Trump because of his policies and because of the policies of the candidate that he defeated. You know, Hillary Clinton's policies towards Russia were more confrontational. Rightly so in my view. I want to make that clear. Whereas Trump has said things as a candidate and as a transition as president as elect, less so as president. That's interesting to watch. but that are, you know, giant concessions, giant gifts to Russia. So if you're Putin, that's clear. You know, he wants to lift sanctions. What does Putin want? He wants sanctions to be lifted. He wants us to recognize a sphere of influence, including Ukraine, that you get your sphere, we get our sphere.

They call it Yalta, too, in the Russian press. And in his dream of dreams, he would love for Trump to recognize Crimea as to being part of Russia, the territory that he annexed back in 2014 from Ukraine. Frank. That's what he wants. And in return for that, you know, to give him a nice, you know, tea in the Kremlin, great trade. What's not clear to me is what Trump wants and seeks from all of this praising of Putin. And, you know, I'm all for good deals if he can make them happen. But the deal of getting praise from Putin in return for legitimating annexation, something we haven't legitimated since, you know, the interwar period, that's a bad deal. for America. Right. I mean, it seems like the one sort of benefit they've talked about is more counterterrorism operation in Syria against ISIS. Bill Burns, who was a former Deputy Secretary of State ambassador to Russia, brilliant guy we both worked with, wrote a piece that sort of cautioned against focusing on

easy cooperation like that at the expense of countries like Ukraine. Because we tried it. Right. I was there. We had a counterterrorism working group. In the height of the reset, we had a terror, you know, that kind of group. Right. We wanted to do it. And it's. And it's, difficult for a number of reasons. One is we don't have the same definition of what is a terrorist. You know, Putin calls terrorists who we call the moderate opposition. Are we going to be bombing them together? Number two, they have different tactics than us, as we saw tragically in Aleppo. They're not afraid to do carpet bombings and kill a lot of civilians in the name of fighting terrorism. We don't fight that way. And number three, and this is a little sensitive, but, you know, when I was in the government,

we coordinated on counter terrorist operations when we could. And sometimes when they're, you know, most vividly, I remember when I was ambassador, the terrorist attacks in Boston, we had a lot of cooperation on the investigation of that. And I think that's important to remember. The Russians were very helpful to our government and to the FBI working inside Russia to investigate, you know,

those two criminals, those two terrorists. And we also did the same during the Sochi Olympics, where we both said neither of our two countries have an interest in allowing a terrorist attack during this major event in your country. Let's cooperate as much as we can. And we built up a kind of satellite office in Sochi. We probably had 120 people. U.S. government officials, most of them dedicated to counterterrorism and security. But the problem is, in the information sharing, sometimes there's disemps. information sharing. And using those channels to obtain information about people that we may think,

you know, are not terrorists. And that, that's a weird world. And it's just, it's difficult to work with them on that. More nerdy foreign policy coming up on Pod Save the World. We, Obama and the rest of us kind of mocked Mitt Romney when he said Russia was our biggest geopolitical foe. Were we wrong? Were we right at the time wrong now? I'm wondering how much crow we need eat here. We were in the middle of being wrong. Got it. Because I remember it vividly. I was already U.S. ambassador. And in my view, and, you know, I wrote this and I said it and I got in some heated arguments with some of our former colleagues, to me, the reset ended when these demonstrations happened that we talked about before. But the bureaucratic inertia back in Washington, that

doesn't stop, right? If you're in charge of arms control, you're just plowing ahead. You know, you're not thinking about all this geopolitical stuff. You're like talking about the next round of negotiations. Same, same with other smaller pieces in the bureaucracy. Like, our job was to, you know, we set up this whole thing, the bilateral presidential commission. I invented that, right? I was the guy that invented it to say more connectivity. And then as ambassador in the spring of 2012, I'm saying less connectivity. And people are like, you know, come on. Nick of your mind. Yeah. And that was a moment of transition. And that's also when the president was running for re-election. Having said that, I still don't believe it was then. I think,

obviously things were becoming tense with the Russians. The moment that they annexed territory, that is a qualitatively different moment when he went into Ukraine, took Crimea, and now to this day, including literally this day. He's supporting separatists in eastern Ukraine. That, I think, was the moment when we knew we were in a different era. And by the way, I would remind your listeners, I think Obama responded rather impressively to that fact. I mean, he, working with Angela Merkel and our allies put in place

the most comprehensive sanctions against Russia ever in the history of our 200-plus year of bilateral relations with them. Do you know how many sanctions, how many people the Bush administration put on the sanctions list? I do know. Zero. When Russia went into Georgia in 2008, right. Zero. That was the right response.

And that just gets to the kind of big question in diplomacy. You get a lot of credit for things that happen on your watch, just for being there. Right. So, you know, one of my colleagues here at Stanford is Condi Rice. She worked at the NSC in the same job I had. when the wall came down in 1989. Right. Did she have anything to do with that, really?

But if it has on your watch, baby, you get to take credit for him. Whereas when Putin invades Crimea, that happened. Actually, that did not happen on my watch. I left the day before he invaded Crimea. I came home the day before. So it didn't happen on my watch. I kept him out of there. But once it happened, you know, there were very few mechanisms or instruments of power

that we had to stop that event. The real trigger for it was the demonstrators in Kiev. They're the ones that triggered this whole thing. We had nothing to do with it. But if it happens, the negative stuff happens on your watch, you get blamed for it as well. Right, right. He lost his buddy in Kiev, who was the president of the time. A president of the time.

President. President. Your coach. My last question for you, because you've been incredibly gracious with your time. Moving on from Russia, you are a democracy expert. You've written books on democracy. I remember being in a million meetings with you during the Arab Spring. And you were one of the guys who a lot of us were very hopeful in the beginning.

And I think you were one of the people who was constantly reminding us that democracy is a generational process with a lot of fits and starts. I'm wondering if you have any reflections from that time or from your studies that make you feel hopeful or not hopeful about the speed with which democracies can unwind. because you hear a lot of hyperbolic statements about what's happening with Donald Trump and his administration now. And a lot of, you know, I think probably well-deserved fears as well. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you honestly, I'm worried. The speed with which he has come into office doing things that feel illiberal to me and anti-democratic and some of them are and others feel like that's moving that way. The flurry of decrees, that doesn't feel like a democratic process.

as somebody who teaches courses on democracy here at Stanford. For me, everybody likes their historical analogy, right? Others go back to the interwar period. But for me, this reminds me of the beginning of the Putin era. When Putin came to power, by the way, he'd never run for elected office ever. And he ran one time, you know, for the first time and became president, not just like Mr. Trump. We didn't really know what he thought. You know, he had these kind of nationalist proclivities, but we were confused.

about exactly what he might do in office. And back then, this is the early 2000s, did two things that are parallel that make me nervous. On the one hand, he promised to cut taxes and to cut corporate taxes. And he did, by the way. He cut corporate taxes by 12 or 13 points,

and he put in place a flat tax of 13%. Pretty radical, right? And won over people that wanted kind of market reform types. And the second thing he did is he called the press the enemy. And he said, they're the enemy and they need to be destroyed. And he did that. He took over the two national television stations in the course of that time. And in that period, people are like, well, we need law and order. We need, you know, we had this tumultuous period

before, let's give them a break. And my Russian friends, we just, I was just at a conference where we rehearsed these arguments just last week, when they look back on that, they say, two things. We were too quick to acquiesce to what he was doing. And we were thinking it'll all kind of taper out. And we didn't resist when we had the power. And then later, we didn't have the power and we tried to resist and was too late. Now, I think there's a lot of parts of that analogy that are also wrong. I want to point that out. Our institutions, our opposition party, our U.S. Congress, our press, our courts, our federal system, elected leaders at the state level are way more robust than Russian similar institutions back in 2000. And our society seems willing to push back,

as we've seen, you know, massive mobilizations twice already in just a few weeks in a way that Russian society was not willing to do. So I'm cautiously optimistic. I'm not cautiously. I'm optimistic in the long run. But I think vigilance now in the short run will help us avoid these more difficult times down the road. That is very good advice for everybody listening. Mike McVall, thank you so much. Yeah, thanks for having it. Everybody buy his book when it comes out.

All right. When's it coming out? In the fall. Okay. We've got a waste to go. Thanks again for being on Pod Save the World. Thank you.