My guest tonight is a professor at Stanford University
who served as U.S. ambassador to Russia
under President Obama.
His latest book is called From Cold War to Hot Peace:
An American Ambassador in Putin's Russia.
Please welcome Ambassador Michael McFaul.
-♪ ♪ -(cheering and applause)
-Welcome to the show. -Thanks for having me.
Congratulations on the book.
Uh, you served as an ambassador to Russia.
-Before we get into the whys and-and the hows-- -Yes.
'Cause Barack Obama sent me there.
That's the answer to your question.
-Why? That's why. I-I didn't have a choice. -Why?
-(cheering and applause) -So...
so I'm assuming he hated you.
(laughs)
Why would someone send you to-- We'll get into the whys--
-why he sent you to Russia. -Okay. All right.
But-but let's talk about Russia and the U.S. right now.
You know, it's a-- it's a continually unfolding story.
And, um, one of the most instant--
uh, one of the most, um, recent, rather, um,
you know, updates to the story was the Helsinki summit.
-Yes, I was there. -Donald Trump meets with,
uh, Vladimir Putin. They have a private meeting,
-which is-- which is abnormal. -Yes.
-And when they emerge from the meeting-- -A ba-- a bad idea.
Let's not-- You're too-too diplomatic.
-It's not abnormal. -Oh, I'm too diplomatic? Oh, wow.
-It's a bad idea. -The ambassador's like-- Okay, okay.
Um, and so Donald Trump comes out,
and what-what shocks people, amongst many other things,
is when he says, um, you know, "Putin was kind enough to say
"that we could interrogate, uh, his people
"who we feel have meddled in the election,
and, in exchange, he gets to interrogate some of our people."
-Yes. -And you were one of the people he was offering up.
-Yeah. -At that point, did you think, "Run"?
(laughs)
Well, I was in Helsinki.
-I work for another network called NBC. -Right.
Uh, and I was there with, uh, Lester Holt.
We were getting ready to go live. Right?
And, uh, he made this crazy proposal,
Putin did. Right? And completely crazy.
Just to underscore how crazy it was,
it is a U.K. businessman
who laundered money out of Russia,
assisted by U.S. officials--
and, at the time, Putin was saying intelligence officials--
-to help Hillary Clinton in her 2016 election. -Right.
So he said all that, and that's when our president said,
"This is a great idea. I want to talk--
-I want to offer up these people." So-- -Oh. Oh.
So-so, Trump heard "Hillary," and then he was like, "Yeah."
I wasn't at the meeting. I wasn't there.
But-but, probably, that piqued his interest, yeah.
Okay, okay. So how-- why is this such a bad idea?
Why would you not want Putin to interrogate you in Russia?
(laughs)
You obviously have never met Mr. Putin. I have.
Uh, um, I mean, let's-let's be serious.
They accused us of a crime.
Vladimir Putin accused me of a crime committed in Russia,
and he-he didn't want to just interrogate me--
he wanted to indict me.
He's-he's accused me of a crime.
So the idea-- whether you're Democrat or Republican,
let's leave that aside-- we can't have our ambassadors,
our soldiers, our, uh, A.I.D. workers,
our, uh-- anybody serving the United States of America abroad
be allowed to be hauled in by dictators.
That sends a really bad message.
-And so we got to push back on that. -Right.
Now, tragically, the president didn't.
President Trump didn't. He called it a great idea.
You know, and, at the time, I don't think he really understood
what was going on. Right?
Um, maybe that's part of the problem.
Maybe he shouldn't spend two hours with Putin
when he doesn't understand these issues.
Uh, eventually, they got it right.
But, uh, you know, to this day,
-I have to worry about travel in third countries. -Right.
There's just-- there's Interpol and something called Red Notice,
where, uh-- I don't think it's likely,
but-but Putin's a little, uh, unhinged these days--
where he might chase me around and seek to detain me
and then extradite me to Russia.
-Wow. I thought I had troubles. -Don't travel with me.
-Yeah, yes. -Yeah.
Um, there is an interesting part of the book
when you talk about Bush's relationship with Putin.
And... the two men had an interesting relationship,
because it seemed like it started off well,
and then 9/11 took things off course, you know,
-with the war in Iraq. -Yes.
But, you know, we were quick to judge Donald Trump
when he said he met with Putin and he believes him
and he's a good guy, et cetera, but you write about an incident
where President Bush did the same thing.
He met with Putin, and Putin was wearing a cross,
and he told him a story of the cross,
and Bush then left the meeting and came out publicly
and said to everyone, "I've looked into this man's soul,
-and he's a good man." -Right.
Could it be that it's not Donald Trump who's an idiot,
but rather that Putin just has really beautiful eyes?
-(laughter) -Like, what does he do
in these meetings to people that makes everyone walk out
going like, "Yeah, maybe, maybe he's cool"?
Well, as I write about in the book,
I've had some meetings with Putin myself.
He has, uh, rather distinct blue eyes,
and they scare the hell out of me.
-Right. -Uh, 'cause he thought of me
as somebody that Barack Obama sent
to foment revolution against him, uh, in Russia,
and he used to say that; his media used to say that.
But to your point, uh, there is this problem with presidents--
and even President Obama
probably had a bit of it himself--
which is, they think that: If I can just establish
a personal relationship with this guy or that guy
or this woman, and here in the case of Russian leaders,
I'll be able to right all the wrongs from the past.
-Right. -And that is a temptation
to personalize politics, personalize diplomacy.
Trump has it worse than anybody I've ever seen.
He wants to meet with everybody and then, once he meets them,
-they're the greatest guy he's ever met, right? -Right.
So whether it's Kim Jong-un, the North Korean guy
in the Singapore summit, or Vladimir Putin,
where he just lavished praise on this guy...
And let's remember who this guy is.
This guy has repressed his people--
it's a dictatorship today--
he has invaded his neighbor,
and annexed territory, right?
If I were writing the Ten Commandments
of how to deal with your neighbors,
"Thou shall not annex the territory of thy neighbor"
would probably be number two or three on my list.
-Right. -"Don't use nuclear weapons" would be the top.
But then he supported this horrible dictator in Syria,
who's gassed his own people.
And then he violated our sovereignty in 2016
in our presidential election.
That's the guy that our president
-was lavishing praise on. -Right.
I don't understand the logic of that diplomacy.
It's interesting that most of the conversation
has been around the lavishing of praise.
-Because I went to Russia for the World Cup, -Yes.
and I had the pleasure of speaking to a few Russians.
I mean, everyone from a taxi driver through to a lawyer
who worked in some way for, like, the administration,
'cause everyone's working for the Kremlin in some way.
-Yes. Good point. -And what was interesting...
I hope you were careful in what you said.
I have nothing... I have nothing to tell them.
I just know where the scripts are.
-(laughter) -Um... and so what was interesting
was-was how Russians... I mean, for the most part,
I didn't speak to all of them, but they said, "We like Putin,
"and he's not a dictator,
"and he's brought Russia back into the Golden Age,
and we feel like an important country again."
-Right. -And, then, many of them said,
and people say this about us, and they go, "But America
has also invaded countries that they shouldn't have invaded,"
and, "America has repressed its people"--
you look at the civil rights movement,
you look at the laws in the country--
and so they go, "So are we not just two superpowers
doing the same thing"? How do you respond to that?
Well, two things. With respect to Putin,
he just was lucky. He showed up as president
right as the Russian economy began to grow
after a decade of the worst depression,
three times worse, their depression in the 1990s,
than what we experienced in America, right?
Had anybody showed up, that would have happened to them.
-Right. -In fact, a former friend of mine,
who was later assassinated-- his name's Boris Nemtsov--
he was the heir apparent.
He was the one that they were gonna choose.
And for a variety of reasons,
Yeltsin decided to go with Putin instead of Nemtsov.
Had he gone with Nemtsov,
history would have been different.
But the second point, it's called "whataboutism."
It's a classic Putin tactic.
And elements of it are true, by the way.
I think it's legitimate to question what America does.
We've made mistakes.
Uh, we've overthrown regimes.
When Vladimir Putin accused me of being sent by Obama
to foment revolution against him, he would say,
don't forget, the Americans did that in 1953 in Iran,
-and they did it in Serbia in 2000, -Right. Right. Right.
and paints a pattern that's consistent.
To that I would say two things.
One, just to be clear,
I was not sent by Barack Obama to overthrow Russia.
That's crazy.
That's not what President Obama was about.
We were not involved in that.
He sent me there to continue a policy
-that we called the "reset." -Right.
It was just that Vladimir Putin was threatened
by his own people, and he needed a scapegoat.
He needed to blame us for those Russians that demonstrated.
They were Russians, they weren't taking my orders.
They were his people.
But the second thing is, my mother taught me
-two wrongs don't make a right. -Right.
So just because you are against the war in Serbia in 1999,
that doesn't make it right for you to annex Crimea.
You know, if-if my house gets broken into,
that doesn't give the right
to my neighbor to break into it again.
And I just think "what about-ism"
is a very dangerous thing,
especially, when it's about me,
because "what about-ism" was exactly
what Putin was doing in Helsinki.
Mueller had indicted these Russians,
Russian intelligence officers,
they were accused of crimes with lots of evidence.
And so he showed up to Helsinki and said,
"Well, what about this McFaul guy?
Uh, I got a list of people that I think are criminals as well."
And that false equivalency,
I think, is every dangerous to walk down.
It's dangerous, and it's also the reality we live in now,
-because Trump seems to buy into that. -Yes.
-He's a big fan of "what about-ism." -Yes.
As someone who has been intimately connected
to the Russians from the American side
for such a long time--
From Cold War to Hot Peace is a very specific title--
Do you think that America
is further away from a conflict because of Trump
and the fact that he'll give everything to Russia,
or do you think that this may lead
to something worse further down the road?
Well, there's this odd thing with the Trump administration
is that the Trump administration, his government,
has one policy towards Russia, but he doesn't agree with it.
So what they're gonna do is hard to predict.
I just want to say that as an observer
from Palo Alto these days.
Um, the structural things, though, I think are pretty bad,
because Putin fears us.
He thinks we're the enemy, and he does think
that we're out to overthrow regimes we don't like.
And let's be clear, there's some empirical data
to support that hypothesis from the past, right?
But because of that paranoia,
whether it's in Russia in 2011 and 2012,
or in Ukraine in 2014,
where people also rose up against him,
I just think, fundamentally, we're never gonna be able
to have a cooperative relationship
as long as Putin is the president of Russia.
Now here's-here's some good news, though.
I'm gonna predict, I'm gonna go out on a limb--
We political scientists, we're not very good
about predicting the future-- I'm gonna predict, though,
that Putin will not be president forever.
Uh, how about that?
-Well, that's a, that's a great prediction. -And that...
And that gives, I think, hope for the future,
because when I was in Russia--
You know, I've lived in Russia six or seven years of my life.
-I've been there many, many times, -Right.
well before I was ambassador--
There's a lot of great people in Russia,
you probably met them.
They want closer relations with us.
They don't understand the geopolitical stuff.
And when I was an ambassador, they tried to ban me, right?
I couldn't be on TV shows like yours, by the way, in Russia,
'cause they didn't want me to be public,
but I would travel around the country,
and I just met too many young people that just said,
"Hey, we just want to live a normal life,
be able to vote for our own rulers."
Right? Not just to have it dictated from above.
"Be able to travel, and have better relations."
So I think, in the long run,
I'm really optimistic about Russia
and U.S.-Russia relations.
I just don't know how long this interregnum
of the Putin era's gonna last.
Thank you so much for being on the show, man.
-Thank you. Thank you for having me. -This was amazing.
-Thank you very much. -Thank you.
From Cold War to Hot Peace is available now.
A fascinating life,
Ambassador Michael McFaul, everybody.