On Nov. 5, U.S. voters will go to the polls in what could be the most consequential presidential election in living memory.
Former U.S. President and Republican candidate Donald Trump, who regularly boasts of his good relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, has criticized military and financial aid for Kyiv, and who many fear could attempt to dismantle both NATO and American democracy, has every chance of returning to office.
Recent polls show that Trump and Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, who has pledged to continue supporting Ukraine if elected, are going into the home stretch neck-and-neck.
The Kyiv Independent sat down with Michael McFaul, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia, professor of international studies at Stanford University, and the co-founder of the Yermak-McFaul Expert Group on Russian Sanctions, to talk about the U.S. elections and what their outcome could mean for Ukraine, Russia, and the future of the rules-based world order.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Kyiv Independent: We have the U.S. presidential elections just a few days away now with polls neck and neck. We have Russia making gains across the front line in Ukraine at an increasing rate, including with North Korean troops now. We have democracy in countries like Georgia on its last legs. How serious is this moment in history?
Michael McFaul: At the end of the Cold War, you had a condition where there was one global superpower. That was the U.S. There was one set of ideas that almost the entire world, both elites and populations, were aspiring to. That was democracy, markets, and a commitment to what back then leaders called the liberal international order. Fast forward to today, all three of those things have changed. So, one, the U.S. is no longer the hegemonic power in the world. You have had the rise of powerful states, like China and Russia.
Second, we now have an ideological division, it's autocrats versus democrats. And the autocratic alliance is China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and some of their surrogates like Hamas and Hezbollah. And the democratic world is the U.S., our NATO allies, our democratic allies in Asia, and our partners in countries like Ukraine, which is on the front line of this fight between autocrats and democrats.
Third, we've had the breakdown of that liberal international order. We don't have an agreement about what those rules are. When they were most grotesquely violated in Ukraine in 2022, well, I would go back to 2014, the international system didn't respond to say, to adhere to the rules of the game. Most countries voted against that, but a lot of them stood on the sidelines. They were neutral, countries like China. Now we saw this group of countries meeting in Kazan for the BRICS meeting. And to me, shockingly, there were many democracies and the head of the United Nations was at that meeting. That suggests to me that we no longer have a unified consensus about what the international rules of the game are.
The Kyiv Independent: Turning to the election, if we try and imagine America's place in the world in a second Trump presidency, predictions vary wildly between someone who's a brutal isolationist who says a lot of things but still throws his weight around the world on one hand, and on the other hand, someone already actively planning to abandon and dismantle NATO, to side with authoritarians, and to open the world to a kind of free-for-all. How do you see his rhetoric and where do you think he is on that spectrum?
Michael McFaul: I am deeply worried about a second Trump presidency, both because of what he might want to do intentionally and because of what his signaling of weakness might provoke unintentionally. When it comes to rhetoric versus reality I think we have to take him at his word. In his first term, he relied on traditional Republicans to fill his foreign policy team, people like (former Secretary of State Mike) Pompeo, (former) Secretary of Defense (James N.) Mattis, (former national security advisors) H.R. McMaster and John Bolton. We disagree about certain policies, but they were basically establishment national security folks. And they most certainly stopped Trump from doing some of the craziest things that he proposed – pulling out of NATO being at the top of that list.
What's going to be different this time around is none of those people are going to be in the Trump administration, he's disparaged all of them.
Second, Trump didn't really know how the government ran when he won in 2016. You know, he was doing other things with his career. A lot of the inertia of the government with respect to national security issues just kept going, and in good ways.
Trump hardly ever talked about supporting democracy or human rights or freedom abroad. He always supported autocrats, met with Putin, and sent love letters to Kim Jong-un. I can't think of a time that he met with opposition leaders from Iran, Belarus, China, or Russia. But during the Trump administration, budgets for democracy promotion actually went up, and Trump just wasn't paying attention to that. Now his team has figured out how it works, and they'll be paying attention and be more in line with what he wants to do.
Third, he will feel like he has an electoral mandate to do these crazier things. If he wins again, when it comes to things like NATO or our allies in Asia, he thinks that the American people support him in saying to Putin do whatever the hell you want. I think history shows that when we are strong, the United States of America, when we exhibit peace through strength, we have more peaceful outcomes. When we signal weakness, when we try to appease dictators, that's when bad things can happen. I think the first important thing to remember is that the Soviet Union and Russia have never attacked a NATO ally. Here in the U.S., there's a group of people who think NATO causes conflict. It's exactly the opposite. NATO has been a stabilizer and has provided peace. There's no doubt in my mind that when Ukraine joins NATO, that will be stabilizing.
But if we're showing that we're no longer credibly committed to NATO, then we will tempt Putin to test our commitment. I don't think he'll try to roll his tanks into downtown Tallinn. But I do think he might test some kind of operation in one of the Baltic states, then pull back and see what happens. That will trigger a debate within NATO, and that will be highly destabilizing.
Owen Racer
The Kyiv Independent: How do you see Trump's claim of being able to bring the war to an end very quickly, if not in 24 hours, but very quickly, by just calling both sides and forcing them to the table? I know it seems ridiculous to talk about, but what would that three-way game look like?
Michael McFaul: There's good news and bad news with regard to this scenario. The good news is, should Trump win and make that phone call, Putin – because there is this ideological affinity between them – might have an incentive to help Trump achieve that outcome if he rightly believes that a successful Donald Trump is in the long-term national interest of Russia as defined by Putin. There might be an incentive for him to help Trump look good because that'll help him achieve other objectives down the road. Having said that, I'm not optimistic that Putin will do that for a couple of just very elementary reasons. One, rarely do wars end when one side is becoming weaker and the stronger side just agrees to stop fighting. Trump coming to power and signaling that he's going to reduce or eliminate assistance to Ukraine, that's going to embolden Putin. He's going to think my enemy is now weaker. That this is a time to go for more, not less.
If you buy a map in Russia today, not only Crimea, but the four other (partially occupied) regions of Ukraine are now on the Russian map because Putin annexed them on paper. I just don't see a scenario under which he gives those territories up until he's stopped on the battlefield. Some crazy Russians say, well, yeah, we can get a peace agreement just as long as Ukraine withdraws from all of those territories (all of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia oblasts) then we'll be happy. That's not going to happen, so I just think it's a bit of a naive scheme.
If Trump is rebuffed, would he then change his mind? That's what my Republican colleagues say. I hope that's true, but I fear they're wrong. I just fear that Trump fundamentally doesn't care about Ukraine. He fundamentally doesn't care about democracy or the international rules of the game, that annexing parts of other countries is a bad thing. He still fundamentally does care about his personal relationship with Putin; he's been very consistent in his support for Putin, his admiration for Putin. That has never, ever wavered.
The Kyiv Independent: It's good that you brought up handing over even more territory. Just a reminder, we're talking about the city of Zaporizhzhia, 700,000 people, the city of Kherson, which was already occupied, another 300,000 people.
Michael McFaul: You just made a really good point that I want to underscore, at least for people in the U.S. Americans and Europeans, I don't want to say all, but they almost reflexively, when they say land for peace, they never think about what you just pointed out, which is people for peace.
Because those are not just uninhabited places. What we're talking about is handing over Ukrainians. And we know how the Russians are treating them. This is colonization. This is imperialism. This is a genocide that we're talking about as part of these swaps. It's not just land. These are human beings who are Ukrainian citizens.
The Kyiv Independent: A lot of Ukrainians see a future Harris presidency as simply a continuation of the current existing policy: the policy of Ukraine given enough support to survive, but not being allowed to win. But after two and a half years, we have Ukrainian forces overstretched, dire manpower shortages that foreign aid can never make up for, and Russia advancing now faster than any time since early 2022. Could President Harris, once elected, be willing to change course and do something braver?
Michael McFaul: I want to see those changes you describe. They've been too incremental and too slow in providing assistance. They put too many constraints. They have not effectively enforced the sanctions regime that is in place that could reduce Putin's supplies of money and technology. There's just more to be done on all fronts. I hope a couple of things will happen.
I hope that after the election, President Biden will finally make the right decision to eliminate constraints on the use of long-range fires. Doing that will not lead to World War III. That's Putin propaganda. We had this debate about Abrams tanks, Patriots (air defense systems) F-16. None of those weapon systems triggered the use of a nuclear weapon in Ukraine. I hope that President Biden will make that decision so that he doesn't hand that decision to President Harris, takes it off the table so that it's already a fait accompli. I think that would be very prudent.
The second thing I hope President Biden will do is signal much more clearly America's support for Ukraine's membership in NATO. Now maybe he has to put some qualifications: after the war, after hostilities have ended. But I think it just needs to be automatic. Whenever hostilities end and wherever the borders are — that's a decision for President Zelensky and the Ukrainian people — but wherever it is, that is the day that Ukraine should become a member of NATO; that is the day that you make sure that there's not going to be a third invasion of Ukraine.
About a President Harris: I know people around her, her national security advisor, Phil Gordon, is a friend of mine. He knows Europe well. He's a European specialist, and they've taken a special interest in Ukraine. Vice President (Harris) on the campaign trail talks about her seven meetings with President Zelensky all the time. Those, I think, are good signs.
I think the transition to a new Harris administration might be more like other transitions where you get new people with new ideas. And I hope that those people will be ones that understand the importance of defeating Putin's army in Ukraine.
The Kyiv Independent: Looking inside Russia now, what will it actually take for Putin to look at the situation and decide he can't continue this war? In Ukraine, people are quite skeptical of internal opposition to the regime having any real effect.
Michael McFaul: Well, tragically, I don't see a scenario under which domestic politics inside Russia will lead to an end of the war. It's a dictatorship. But we have to admit — and this is an argument I have with Russian opposition leaders all the time — Putin's not fighting this war alone. This is not Putin's war. This is Russia's war. Millions and millions and millions of Russians support this barbarism. They're the ones doing the killing, the terrorist attacks against Ukrainians. They're the ones kidnapping Ukrainian children. And tragically, more people support the war today than they did at the beginning of the escalated invasion in 2022. And the oligarchs are not going to get together and tell them, hey, Vladimir, this war is bad for us too. They have their billions because Putin gave them permission to have them. We just have to help Ukrainian warriors stop or defeat the Russian invading army. It's just that simple. There's no roundabout.
History doesn't repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes. And there are lots of instances where defeat in war leads to political change inside countries, including Russia back in 1917, and even the war in Afghanistan. So, to the Russian opposition – you don't have very many effective means to do things inside Russia. The best thing that could happen for you is for Putin to lose this war. And so I would encourage you to speak more loudly about helping Ukrainians and their supporters in the West to achieve that fact.
You can watch the video version of this interview on our YouTube channel:
Note from the author:
Hi, this is Francis Farrell, who spoke to Michael McFaul for this piece. Well, this is it, this is the moment that could make or break Ukraine's struggle for existence, independence, and freedom, and it will be decided by millions of people an ocean away from Ukraine. Whatever the result, the winter ahead is going to be a very dark and very unpredictable one, but none of that means we will stop our work for a second. Please consider supporting our reporting.
