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FROM THE COLD WAR TO HOT PEACE
An American Ambassador to Putin's Russia
By Michael McFaul
Illustrated. 506 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. In May 2012, the US ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, accompanied a senior White House official to a meeting with Vladimir V. Putin in the field of the former president-elect. In the midst of the discussion, Putin turned directly to McFaul and reprimanded him for attempting to ruin relations between the United States and Russia. In "From the Cold War to Peace," McFaul wonders, "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. For if it's the only personal confrontation between the two men that he tells, the broader battle between their opposing visions of international affairs dominates the book. This memoir tells a political story as personal: the story of a man who looks at his own efforts to promote cooperation and integration between America and Russia is canceled by Putin himself. even.
McFaul militant democracy in Moscow during the last years of Soviet power before becoming a scholar of contemporary Russia at Stanford University. In 2008, he joined Barack Obama's presidential campaign and was then appointed director of Russian affairs at the National Security Council before serving as ambassador to Moscow from 2012 to 2014. McFaul combines analytical and personal perspectives to offer a a fascinating and timely account of the current crisis in relations between Russia and the United States.
The dramatic pivot of McFaul's story comes at the end of 2011, when relations between Russia and the United States quickly deteriorated. The main cause was, McFaul maintains, Russian domestic policy. Putin's first terms as president had been underpinned by a social pact in which the Kremlin offered a rise in living standards in return for political support or at least acquiescence. In 2011, under Medvedev, the fallout of the financial crisis hit hard Russia, this agreement began to erode.
In September, many educated Russians were outraged at the announcement of a "castling", in which Medvedev and Putin announced that they would exchange positions of President and Prime Minister. Massive protests against electoral fraud in the December parliamentary elections invaded Russian cities and frightened the Kremlin. With the presidential vote looming in March 2012, Putin turned to the enemies at home and abroad to revalidate himself as a defender of the Russian people.
The new American ambassador was the perfect darling of the Kremlin – heavenly manna for Putin's electoral effort, as one senior Russian official said. Here is a diplomat with a long history of personal support for democratic movements in Russia and the author, no less, of a book titled "Russia's Unfinished Revolution". A few days after McFaul took office in January 2012, the influential TV host Mikhail Leontiev All the show shows an ax work on McFaul, suggesting that the real mission of the ambassador was to overthrow the government Russian, to "end the revolution".
The Kremlin subjected McFaul and his staff to harassment and vitriol of international diplomacy. Government spokespeople in the press and on television attacked McFaul as "the color revolutions specialist sent by Obama to orchestrate the regime change." A fake Twitter account claiming to belong to the ambassador tweeted critics of the Russian elections; videos posted on YouTube suggest that he was a pedophile; agents of the pro-Kremlin youth organization, Nashi, repeatedly ambushed McFaul in the street with accusations and insinuations; even his children have been invaded by the Russian security services.
McFaul did his best to swim against this wave of official hostility. He took Twitter and Facebook to try to communicate directly with the Russian people, an unorthodox approach that enjoyed, he says, some success, but ruffled feathers in Moscow. He has organized receptions, concerts and conferences to promote not only American culture but also respect for democratic values. Against the crackdown on the protest movement, many opposition leaders have even refused to meet McFaul for fear of being demonized as puppets of the US State Department. "Our tweets and jazz concerts were no match," admits McFaul, for Putin's "media empire."
If the Reset had been interrupted by Putin's re-election in 2012, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea in 2014 "For good." McFaul thought this Blatant violation of international standards was evidence that his own long-term efforts to promote democracy in Russia and ensure integration with the West had completely failed. His personal tragedy was crowned by the fact that he is now persona non grata in Russia, the first American ambassador to have been banished from the country since George Kennan in 1952.
Putin is clearly the villain in this story. McFaul concluded that the Russian president was "paranoid", a man of "fixed and imperfect views" who "saw us as the enemy", and that as long as he ruled Russia, "the strategic partnership was impossible. " energy and conviction. Yet his relentless interest in Putin's individual role tends to overshadow the broader evolution of attitudes towards the West within the Russian political establishment. There are, for example, only passing references to siloviki – hard-liners with a background in security services that were all uncomfortable about Medvedev's adoption of the Reset. In fact, Putin is far from being the only one to be hostile to what he sees as an aggressive expansionism of NATO and the threat of US missile defense programs. It is not the only one to believe that the United States orchestrated the overthrow of the Ukrainian government of Viktor F. Yanukovich in 2014.
And what about the public opinion ? McFaul admits that Putin's popularity "suggests a deep societal demand for this kind of autocratic leader, and that kind of antagonistic relationship with the United States and the West." But instead of developing this idea, McFaul leaves the problem perverted
for the rapid deterioration of US-Russian relations squarely on the shoulders of the Russian president at his call. He promises the promise that the Kremlin's West policy could once again switch when Putin finally withdraws or is expelled. Perhaps, but the most pessimistic viewpoint is that Putin represents a now-rooted revanchist nationalism that views the liberal international order as a mere smokescreen for the advancement of Western political agendas. The deeply rooted antagonism towards the United States could last a long time after Putin left. As McFaul himself laments, "the warm peace, tragically but perhaps necessarily, seems here to stay."
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