Your Independent Journal from the Heartland
For decade after decade, China and Russia have thrown existential challenges at the United States on a variety of military, economic, and diplomatic fronts. Yet, the two nations currently are not our biggest opponents, according to Michael McFaul, a former U.S. Ambassador to Russia.
In his significant and timely new book, “Autocrats vs. Democrats,” McFaul contends: “Today’s greatest threat to our security and prosperity is…our divided selves. If we can get our act together at home—if we can break this fever of extreme polarization—we will prevail and prosper again, as we did during the Cold War.”
A longtime Russia expert, McFaul is now a political science professor at Stanford University, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and a Hoover Institution fellow. He advised the Obama Administration on its dealings with Russia and was the National Security Council’s director of Russian and Eurasian affairs before sparring with Vladimir Putin as a diplomat in Moscow for two years. He also has studied many aspects of China and its leaders’ policies.
McFaul believes that getting our national act together includes convincing American voters to pay closer attention to the recent policies, global actions, and personal whims of both Putin and China’s strongman, Xi Jingpin. And it is helpful to understand why our relations with these two world powers have remained so rocky, he says. Nothing is simple, however, in America’s past and present postures toward the Russian Federation and People’s Republic of China.
Nonetheless, McFaul makes a valiant effort to offer readers basic explanations of the most important conflicts and their roots, some of which date to the 18th century. His new work (he has written more than a dozen) is not a quick read, weighing in at 544 pages—after being pared down from a draft of 1,200 pages. But it is tailored more for general readers than for academics and policy wonks.
“Autocrats vs. Democrats” is organized into three parts. “Part I explains the causes of great power competition today, using the history of US-Russia and US-China relations over the past three centuries to explain how we arrived at the tensions defining our current era.” Part II “describes the present, providing a snapshot of great power competition today along three dimensions—power, ideology, and competing visions of global order.” And: “In part III … I put my policymaker hat back on to propose a set of prescriptions for future American leaders.”
His book’s proposed “democratic reforms and defenses” include some “sweeping ‘shoulds’ and ‘musts’ that are easy to list and hard to achieve,” McFaul concedes. “Some readers might read my list of reforms as partisan. That is not my intention. Instead, I aim to suggest reforms that would strengthen American democratic institutions—the rules of the game of democracy—without wading into policy debates between Republicans or Democrats or conservatives and liberals.”
One of his proposals is to shore up new democracies around the world without using military force. “To make clear that military force should never be conflated with democracy promotion, every national security strategy written by future American presidents should state that we will not use our armed forces for democratic regime change.”
Meanwhile, “American leaders … must innovate, reform, and renew American capitalism to outperform China,” he urges. “The American economic model would benefit greatly from better health care, childcare, and elderly care, improved K-12 education, more housing, better transportation infrastructure, and successful climate-change policies.”
McFaul remains concerned about “the American public’s lack of engagement with foreign policy issues. And when that engagement does happen, it is often oversimplified, reduced to slogans and bumper stickers, or stops at the statement of an objective without a feasible strategy for achieving it.”
But he hopes this new book “will be read by nonexperts, especially in the United States, which will help us as a country have a more informed debate about America’s place in the world.”
“Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder,” by Michael McFaul, Mariner Books, hardback, 544 pages, ebook and audio book formats.
Si Dunn is a freelance writer in Franklin, Mass. He previously worked for newspapers in Texas and Arkansas and is a book reviewer for Lone Star Literary Life.
Email sidunn@sagecreekproductions.com.
