TRANSCRIPT

McFaul: You're listening to World Class from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. I'm your host, Michael McFaul.

Well, actually, I'm not your host today! We're going to do something a little different. Today we have Professor Jim Goldgeier back with us. You'll remember him from our episode a few months ago when we talked about U.S.-European security partnership. He's a long-term friend of mine and collaborator, co-author. But today he's going to take over the host seat to interview me about my new book, Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder. This is my most ambitious book I think I've ever written. It's out today, October 28th, and you can purchase it from any major bookseller.

Jim, over to you.

Goldgeier: All right, great. Well, thanks for having me back on the podcast and huge congratulations on the publication of the book. What an achievement. My copy is coming in the mail any moment now, and I look forward to getting it signed. I urge people to go out and get it. As you just mentioned at the outset, you've described this as your most ambitious book ever. So what made it so ambitious?

McFaul: Well, it's a synthetic book, Jim. I'm trying to synthesize a lot of different literatures, a lot of history. The book begins in the 18th century tracing U.S.-China relations and U.S.-Russia relations. And then it ends with three prescriptive chapters about how the United States should operate in the world.

The goals of the book changed over time, because it took me so darn long to write it. It took me several years. But the original idea behind the book was there was a debate back a decade ago about how economic liberalization in China was going to lead to political transformation there. And I'd written about post-communist transformations in Russia, the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe. I wrote a book even back in 1993 about the variation of them.

And I was skeptical that that was going to happen. I hadn't seen many Marxist-Leninist regimes change. But then the book dragged on. I spent some time in China. Then the Trump administration took over. And then there became a new consensus about China and that we had entered a new Cold War with China.

And you and I, you know, we both wrote books about the Cold War in that period, and I wanted to interrogate that hypothesis: Is this really a new Cold War? So that was like a second motivation, and that took a lot of time and a lot of work. And my bottom line was that there are some parallels to the Cold War, especially with China, but there are a lot of differences. And so I wrestled with that and that was a major thing I wanted to contribute.

But then there was also—in comparing China and Russia—I thought we were underestimating the Russia threat because we were just looking at capabilities. We were just looking at GDP and soldiers. And on those metrics, Russia is a much weaker country than China or the United States. And I felt that when I was writing that; that was something I wanted to say.

And then—I'd already finished the first draft of the book, Jim—I mailed it to the publisher in January 2022. And as you know, and our listeners will know, the next month Russia launched its full-scale invasion. So then I had to account for that. So that slowed the book down.

And then the fourth piece: while writing a book, I finished most of it. And then President Trump was reelected and pivoted in many ways, in terms of policy prescriptions, in ways almost antithetical to most of the prescriptions I was arguing about.

To oversimplify, he is withdrawing from the international system. I think we should be engaged. He's a unilateralist. I think multilateralism is better for America's long-term national security interests and prosperity.

And he doesn't really believe in promoting democracy around the world. I think that advances America's interests and values. And so the last part of the book, I had to do a lot of rewriting between January and when I had to send it to the publisher to account for this radical shift in American foreign policy, which I think is actually a shift in the wrong direction.

So that's why it took so much time, and that's why I think, retrospectively, it's probably the most ambitious book I've ever written.

Goldgeier: Well, it's awesome.

McFaul: Doesn't mean it's the best book! The best book is the one I did with you! But most ambitious for sure.

Goldgeier: When we talk about autocrats versus democrats, now. We've got the international system. You mentioned China and Russia. China and Russia have been deepening their collaboration-cooperation since the launch of the full-scale invasion in February of 2022. We've got autocrats versus democrats here in the United States. How do you think about this moment of autocrats versus democrats in the world and then autocrats versus democrats here in the United States itself?

McFaul: Well, the first thing I want to say—as you know well, Jim, because you know this literature probably better than I do—but by saying it's a struggle between autocrats and democrats, there's lots of academics that disagree with that framing and there are lots of foreign policy officials that disagree with that. They think it's all about power and that's what great power competition is about. And in my book, I have three chapters on power, just so everybody knows. 

I start with power. And I think power is an essential ingredient for understanding global affairs and international relations. But I don't think it's the only thing. I add to that regimes and I even add individuals, which is something you've written about yourself. I think it's all three, and they change over time. And to show the variation, that's why I begin in the 18th century to show how shifting power balances, regime types, and individuals can have a causal influence on U.S.-Russia relations and U.S.-China relations.

But I fully acknowledge that not everybody agrees with that. And I try to martial evidence to show why that matters.

But with respect to today, I would say two things about your question. Number one, when I talk about similarities and differences with U.S.-Russia and U.S.-China, I do say that there was ideological competition between the Soviets and the Americans back in the Cold War. And there's ideological competition today between China and Russia in the United States.

At the same time, I also say that there's a big difference in ideological competition in the 21st century, in that this competition is not just between states, but within states and within countries, as you just rightly noted. That's different from the Cold War.

You know, back when I was an undergraduate, and I remember those maps. Right? The maps were red states and blue states, right? And which team were you on? France? They're part of the blue team. China? They're part of the red team. Some countries were divided: West Germany, East Germany. But it was basically communism and capitalism, and it was a struggle between states.

Now, most certainly there were people living in Poland and the Soviet Union that were liberal democrats. I met them. I lived in those countries. And we had some communists here in the United States. They're mostly up at UC Berkeley where Jim was a PhD student. I remember going up there and saying, “Oh my God, these are real life communists!” But they were pretty marginal characters.

They're not marginal characters today in this ideological struggle. And I would say illiberal nationalists versus liberal internationalists. Putin most certainly is an ideologue. He's not a communist. But he thinks that he is in a global fight against what he calls ‘decadent liberalism’ from the West.

And he spent the first decade in power in Moscow consolidating his regime and those ideas inside Russia. But lately—for the last several years and even decades—he's been exporting those ideas. And he's been investing in instruments of ideological export, things like Russia Today, things like Russian NGOs that meet with like-minded American and European non-governmental organizations that's based on an ideological affinity.

The Russian Orthodox Church, for example: I remember when I was the ambassador in Russia, getting a cable that completely shocked me. The Russian Orthodox Church had invited a group of evangelical religious leaders from churches in the American South to meet to talk about their shared ideological vision of the world.

And today you have guys like Aleksandr Dugin—one of the chief ideological architects of Putin's worldview—he appears on the Infowars podcast. And he has more ideological affinity with Americans like Steve Bannon than I have with Steve Bannon, even though we're both Americans. And that, that's a difference, right? That's within Hungary, this ideological struggle within Italy, within France and, within the United States of America. And I think we've been underestimating that at our peril.

Goldgeier: So, you mentioned how some of the chapters you talk about power and you've got a lot of different things that you're doing with the book and you're not just a scholar; you're also a teacher. And I've seen the ways in which you've utilized the drafts of the book in your classes and you've sought feedback from your students on the draft chapters. Your thoughts on how your students have helped strengthen the book?

McFaul: Well, first you've helped strengthen the book, Jim, by reading pieces of it and participating in that class, soI want to thank you for that. It's one of the great blessings of being a professor at a place like Stanford that you get to interact with professors like Professor Goldgier. 

But you also get to interact with these students from all over the world. And like all of my books—including the one we wrote together—I tend to teach courses about books I'm writing, because I get this feedback from these students. They think that they're paying Stanford to learn from me, but I learn a lot from them.

In fact, I just saw one of them last night at a book talk, a more conservative student, a supporter of President Trump. And I learned a lot. He compelled me to change some of the things I wrote about erosion of democracy here in the United States to have to look at some of the issues that people that think like he thinks. The fingerprints of him are in this book. And I've learned a lot from them.

And I also would say, you know, as you've seen in my class, I set up all my classes as debates. 

Everything is a hypothesis in my class, and I assign my students positions to take. They pick numbers and then they have to debate positions. For example: America is an ideological power. America is not an ideological power. China is seeking to promote communism all over the world. China is not seeking to promote communism all over the world. And I set them up deliberately as debates. They get assigned these things so that it doesn't have to necessarily be their own view, right?

And I've learned over the years that that helps to make it easier for them. If it's all about their personal views, then it's hard when I think, I believe, I feel, those phrases are not usually useful in a class. And you and I know, Jim, in academia, there's way too much conflation of people's views and their hypotheses that then become personalized. The minute you put your name on it, it gets personalized and people can't separate your arguments from who you are personally.

But in doing that, you sharpen your ideas, you look for better evidence to support your hypotheses. And even if you disagree with me on this debate, say about liberalism versus realism that we have in academia, there's no doubt that the realists in my class make better arguments because they have to debate them.

My last class, by the way, Jim, at one point I did a poll at the end of it and I said: Who's a bigger supporter of Mearsheimer versus McFaul? And I think the majority of the class voted for John Mearsheimer. But that made my arguments better to be in tension with those students who are Mearsheimer fans. I still think he's wrong, and I present a lot of evidence to support my hypotheses, but having those debates in class with supporters of Mearsheimer, I think made the book better.

Goldgeier: Well, you've just given a great reason for faculty to be using the book in their classrooms and also given them a way to think about how to use the book, or really any book like the one you've written, and the way in which they construct your debates in their classroom. 

I look forward to hearing from faculty about how they've been able to use your book in ways to help their students think. We always learn when we write anything. We always learn from the research and writing. And you've just talked about how you learned so much from your students. 

Just curious whether there were any surprises for you? As you did the research, were there things where you were like, “Gosh, I didn't know that”? Anything that stood out as something, especially given that you did such a historical sweep in the study?

McFaul: Well, most certainly, I had dabbled in the histories of, you know, the beginning of the American Republic and the relations with China and Russia. But I had to learn a lot, both about U.S.-Russia relations, U.S.-China relations that I did not know. So all of that is brand new. 

And earlier periods where there were American NGOs, and in particular American Jewish organizations, that organized to influence American foreign policy towards Russia back in the 19th century and early 20th century to talk about human rights. I didn't know any of that literature. That was all eye opening to me.

We think that's a phenomenon from the Cold War, but actually pogroms in Russia mobilized American organizations to say we should think about morality in our foreign policy, not just this kind of balance of power politics. Same with respect to religious organizations working in China, Christian organizations that got involved in debates about how we should have relations and shape our foreign policy towards China. I didn't know any of that.

Second, more sobering for me: you know, you and I, we wrote about Cold War politics and U.S.-Soviet relations, and I thought I knew all of that. But when I went back and relearned it, Jim, I'd forgotten, or maybe I never knew, how deep some of those policy debates were.

You know, there's this thing, “containment.” But containment turned out to be a very elastic term that meant a lot of different things to a lot of different presidents. And I kind of had to relearn that, particularly about George Kennan. I'd forgotten that Kennan was against NATO, and then he wasn't even a supporter of us getting involved in the Korean War. 

You know, Kennan's lionized as this great strategic thinker, but he was wrong about a lot of these things. . .you know, bringing West Germany into the NATO Alliance in ‘55. This is something, you know a lot better than I do, but I'd forgotten that stuff. That was interesting to me.

And then the last piece, more recent: I came in with some hypotheses about American power versus Chinese power. And I came with the thought, you know, that we're ahead on most metrics and we'll just get the data. I remember a book by Michael Beckley that had a big impact on me from several years ago in a similar vein. And I would say in the aggregate, especially when we bring allies into the equation, I still think in terms of aggregate military and economic power and most certainly ideational power, the democrats have more power than the autocrats. 

But when it comes to certain parts about Chinese capabilities—Chinese manufacturing, for instance, right? Chinese AI companies, artificial intelligence companies—I started the book more confident than I am today. That was a genuine discovery that makes me worry.

I have pieces in the book about mistakes we made during the Cold War of overestimating Soviet power. And I have a whole chapter on Cold War mistakes that we need to not replicate. I also have a whole chapter on successes that we should replicate. But I'm less confident in those predictions today than I was when I began the book.

Goldgeier: So you've referred now back to the Cold War period and then we came out of the Cold War and the end of the Cold War was the beginning of our professional career and it was super optimistic. It seemed like democracy was on the march and autocracies were in retreat and communist regimes had collapsed, and it all seemed very exciting.

And now here we are today. And a lot of us who believe in democracy and want to live in a democracy are feeling more and more pessimistic about democracy in the world, about the ability of these authoritarian countries to pursue their interests, about where the United States is heading. And I just thought for this final part here, one of the great features of your personality is you're such an optimist.

So I was hoping that you could leave us with something optimistic. That's what I always count on you for. And so, what do you got that would really help our listeners feel optimistic about the future?

McFaul: It most certainly is a very challenging time for small-d democrats, right? Not big-D, Democratic party Democrats, but small-d democrats, both in America and the world. And I go through that in detail. And you're right; thirty years ago—all of my chapters start thirty years ago when we were the hegemon, and now we're not. Ideologically, everybody wanted to be democratic, end of history, and now we're not. Then the global order— we had something called the liberal international order. President H.W. Bush got us all together to push Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. That was a glorious moment. And now we have competing conceptions of the global order thirty years later.

And that's analytically where we're at. And I trace those patterns on all those dimensions.

But when I get to the prescriptive chapters, I would say two things.

First here at home: we are, in my opinion—and I have data to support the hypothesis—we're in a bigger struggle for preserving and strengthening democratic institutions here in the United States. I think you have to go back to the Civil War to remember a time that was as difficult. Now, the 60s were pretty difficult and leading to Nixon's resignation—I talk about that in the book—but this feels like a very trying time.

And it reminds me of the early Putin years when Putin came to power and was doing similar things. In fact, I wrote a piece for the Washington Post comparing Trump and Putin back in February of 2017. But when it comes to that comparison, there are parallels. You know, pushing comedians off television stations. That's what Putin did. Using rule of law to be ruled by law to try and prosecute critics. That's what Putin did. That’s what Trump's trying to do.

But there are two big differences between Putin's Russia in the early 2000s in America. And then I'll get to the international. One: we have a deeper tradition of democracy that goes back hundreds of years. The Russians only had a few years of practice with democracy. And you see those traditions and you see those values when you see rallies with several million people about no kings. Well, that's an echo that goes back to the 18th century, right? Not just a few years. 

And I think that makes me optimistic that we'll get through this, because society and American NGOs are mobilized, and that goes back with hundreds of years of tradition, not just a few years.

And second, and related to that, our institutions that check presidential power are stronger today than they were in Putin's Russia. We have governors, we have independent media, we have political parties, we have NGOs, and they're just way stronger today than they were in the 2000s. And so I'm cautiously optimistic that it's a tough time, but I'm not in the camp that we are, you know, just a few moves from dictatorship in America. I think that's an underestimation of these institutions and societal values here at home.

And then on the international side: I think it's hard. I don't want to underestimate the challenge. But I see two things that inspire me. One data and one just on a personal level.

On the data side: when you look at public opinion polls, the majority of people around the world still believe that it's better to elect their leaders than to have a communist party or a military junta or theocrats decide who rules you. So that's not an American value; that's a universal value. And the data, it's waning. It's not as strong as it was thirty years ago, but it's still more robust. 

I'm still with Churchill: democracy is a horrible system of government except for all the others tried. And most people around the world agree more with Churchill than they do Putin or Xi Jinping or the theocrats in Iran or Kim Jong-un. That gives me cause for optimism.

But the second thing is more personal. I've had the privilege, Jim, of meeting a lot of small-d democrats fighting for democracy in liberal democracies in Europe, but I think especially about the Chinese and Iranians and North Koreans and Russians and Belarusians and Ukrainians that I have had the privilege to know. They're not giving up. Ukrainians especially, they're not giving up. They're on the front lines fighting for democracy and independence.

And if they're not giving up—Zelenskyy's not giving up—how can I give up? If small-d democrats from Venezuela are still fighting for their country . . . we have somebody here at Stanford who worked with Machado and was part of that democratic movement and now is living in exile here. If Hector's not giving up, how can I give up? If Zhanna Nemtsova, her dad was killed . . . she's still fighting for democracy. If Dasha Navalnaya, her dad was killed by Putin, if she's not giving up, how can I give up?

I take inspiration from these people under much more incredibly difficult circumstances are still fighting for democracy. A) I'd rather be on their side than the side of the autocrats. I think they are going to win. And B) Me as an American, as a small-d democrat, I'm going be on their side. And I hope that my country in the long run will also be on their side.

Goldgeier: I knew I could count on you. Appreciate that. We're all inspired. Again, congratulations on the book. Looking forward to an upcoming book talk and urge people to buy the book. And thanks for letting me come in and guest host the podcast.

McFaul: Well, Jim, we should do more of this! You should take over this podcast. That was a fantastic conversation. Thanks for sitting in for me.

You've been listening to World Class from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. If you like what you're hearing, please leave us a review and be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast to stay up to date on what's happening in the world, and why.