A Nostalgic Read for Foreign Policy Elites

IF YOU WERE looking for a human avatar of America's unipolar moment, you couldn't do better than Michael McFaul. Picture a youthful, energetic McFaul with a newly minted Ph.D. bounding into the suddenly post-Soviet space of the early 1990s, full of bright ideas about democracy and faith in the end of history. As McFaul himself puts it, 1991 "was a glorious moment to be a democratic, liberal, capitalist, multilateralist, and American....I was treated like a rockstar."

- EMMA ASHFORD

History, however, was undeterred. From his perch in the Democratic Party's foreign policy elite, McFaul had a front-row seat for the twists and turns of U.S. foreign policy. As an adviser on national security to President Barack Obama and later as Obama's ambassador to Russia, he watched the U.S.-Russia relationship worsen; he negotiated Russia's fateful abstention from the United Nations Security Council vote authorizing NATO intervention in Libya. He became an informal advisor to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign and then a commentator for MSNBC, where he drew connections between resisting President Donald Trump at home and promoting democracy overseas.

McFaul's new book, Autocrats vs. Democrats, highlights the brighter moments of that arc while eliding or dismissing its darker ones. He sings the praises of America's response to the Russian seizure of Crimea and of Obama's attempts to engage overseas democracy movements, but he glosses over the excesses of the unipolar moment. He offers only a few paragraphs on Iraq (while reminding readers that he was not an Iraq war booster). On NATO expansion and its role in today's European tensions, his book is entirely silent.

The book's central, perhaps defining, theme is an unshakeable faith in the righteousness of post-Cold War liberal foreign policy, coupled with an unwillingness to explore the unintended consequences that emerged along the way. McFaul deplores the American public's falling support for liberal international order—or rising “isolationism,” as he sees it—but without dwelling overmuch on why American attitudes shifted so dramatically. Nor does he question whether some of these liberal crusades contributed to the very nationalism and illiberalism that now haunt politics throughout the Western world.

In that respect, this book feels very much as though it were written in 2015, not 2025.