It is a bad time to argue that the United States should do more to promote democracy around the world, and Michael McFaul knows it. “Some will dismiss my worldview and policy recommendations as old-fashioned and out of date,” he acknowledges in his new book, Autocrats vs. Democrats. “I am okay with that.”
McFaul served at the highest levels of the U.S. government, but he is at heart a scholar, educator, and activist. The result is a book that is ambitious, accessible, and incisive in its arguments. But when it comes to his recommendations, even those who share McFaul’s enduring faith in democracy may conclude he has written a playbook for a world gone by.
McFaul has pushed for democratization since his student days, when he advocated against apartheid in South Africa and supported Russia’s post-Cold War transition. He comes by his convictions honestly, knowing how millions of people’s lives can change when things go well. And for so many years, they did. McFaul’s book is imbued with the spirit of the post-Cold War era, with visions of a world based on cooperation rather than conflict.
The book cover for Autocrats vs. Democrats.
Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder, Michael McFaul, Mariner Books, 544 pp., $28, October 2025
In the last two decades, that vision unraveled, and McFaul had a front-row seat. In his previous book, From Cold War to Hot Peace, McFaul details how his efforts for democratic change, from Russia to the Middle East, showed early promise, stalled, and then were rolled back. Since he left government, Russia twice invaded Ukraine, China ramped up pressure on Taiwan, and the global democratic recession deepened to include the United States itself.
To make sense of these developments, McFaul has written a book that is at once a history, net assessment, and sermon. He explains how we arrived at such a fraught moment, accounts for how U.S. capabilities measure up to those of China and Russia, and pleads with Americans not to give up on democracy promotion. The unwelcome ghost hovering over McFaul as he makes his case is Donald Trump, whom voters returned to office after this 544-page manuscript was largely completed.
McFaul has updated key sections of the book to account for Trump’s second term. But at a deeper level, he still seems to be contending with the fact that, in his contest of autocrats and democrats, the leader of the democratic team is switching jerseys. What does McFaul think it says about democracy itself that the world’s oldest and most prosperous democratic government elected Trump twice? Does he fear that the resulting damage changes the foreign policy playbook for future presidents who inherit the consequences?
To McFaul, these developments reflect the natural ebb and flow of political thought. “[I]deas about democracy and liberalism have faded in popularity many times, but eventually came back into fashion,” he writes, expecting that there may be a “window of opportunity” for his ideas in the future. The resulting prescription for wavering democrats is straightforward: double down.
McFaul offers that prescription not only to his fellow scholars but to the broader public for whom he insists he wrote the book. The writing is conversational, even breezy, and he inserts himself into the narrative to liven it up without being overbearing. Historians may quibble with the way he compresses 200 years of U.S.-Russia and U.S.-China relations into two chapters. But for readers making sense of the global map in a world that seems to have gone mad, this is a valuable service.
Trump and Putin are seen in profile as they shake hands while standing on a red carpet on the tarmac of an airport. The stairs to a aircraft are visible behind them.
U.S. President Donald Trump (right) greets Russian President Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, on Aug. 15. Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
McFaul’s analysis starts to wobble when he argues Americans are underrating Russia’s power and overrating China. McFaul is nothing if not thorough, carefully counting the number of nuclear warheads, planes, ships, and submarines each country has, as well as their GDP, growth rates, trade balances, and technological breakthroughs. But his read of how Washington assesses these countries is open to debate.
On Russia, it is certainly fair to say that Barack Obama underrated the country when he mocked Mitt Romney for calling it the United States’ number one geopolitical foe, suggesting the 1980s were “calling to ask for their foreign policy back.” But the idea that the United States is underrating Russia now makes less sense. In fact, the Biden administration faced sustained criticism for putting limits on weapons transfers so as to manage the risk of Russian escalation. As for Trump, he rolled out an actual red carpet for Putin in Alaska and called Russia a “powerful nation,” chiding Ukraine for not reflecting this fact: “You don’t take on a nation that’s 10 times your size.”
Indeed, Russia is a disruptive force in global politics, but this is less a reflection of unique capabilities than of the ease of fomenting chaos in an interconnected world. As former Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn said, “Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one.”
Which brings us to the country that knows how to build—if not barns, then bridges, dams, ships, batteries, electric vehicles, solar panels, and drones: China. McFaul notes that China’s scale masks real weaknesses: population decline, an untested military, and economic policies that are unpopular abroad and have stunted growth at home. Awareness of these trends is a necessary corrective to the idea that China, to borrow a phrase from both Biden and Trump, is about to “eat our lunch.”
Yet McFaul undersells just how valuable China’s manufacturing edge would be in the event of a conflict. The Ukraine war highlighted the need to innovate on the battlefield but also affirmed the enduring value of conventional military capabilities. A war with China, Noah Smith has argued, would inevitably come down to “who can produce more munitions and get them to the battlefield in time.” McFaul sounds the right notes on diversifying supply chains and increasing the defense budget, but the suite of policies he recommends, wrapped up in a frame that suggests China’s military strength is overstated, belies the singular urgency of rebuilding the United States’ defense industrial base.
If McFaul’s assessments of Russian and Chinese capabilities are imperfect, his analysis of their motivations and behavior is superb. As historians know, extracting lessons from the past is a dicey business. Yet his careful and unvarnished chapters on what the United States got right and wrong in the Cold War illuminate the choices ahead by showing what is both similar and different.
In the latter category, he notes not only that the world is more economically integrated today but that China and Russia are much closer than they were during the Cold War. While his longtime colleague Condoleezza Rice has said that rather than seeking to drive a wedge between China and Russia, the United States ought to “slam them together and let them deal with their own internal contradictions,” McFaul offers a sobering case that the China-Russia alliance is real and can last for a while.
But just because the two countries are both autocratic and coordinating with one another does not mean the United States should treat them alike. McFaul makes hundreds of recommendations in this book, but none is more vital than the distinction he draws between China and Russia. To McFaul, Russia is a lost cause as long as Putin is at the helm. While McFaul’s judgment is tinged with emotion after having spent decades working to prevent such an outcome, it is hard to disagree with him. The resulting policy is difficult to execute but simple to conceive: to deter and defend against Putin’s actions to threaten his neighbors and destabilize global cooperation.
When it comes to China, however, McFaul declines to join the chorus of voices who suggest the die is cast. Lumping China with Russia is “premature,” he concludes. “Quietly, persistently, and with low expectations for success, American leaders must remind their Chinese counterparts that China is better off as a major player in the existing global order than it would be as a rogue state like Russia.” Recent talk in U.S. policy circles of a “reverse Kissinger” is understandable: Aside from his nuclear weapons, Putin cannot threaten the United States at anywhere near the scale that China can, and Xi Jinping has charted a dangerous course. But McFaul is correct that for now, if the United States is aiming for a diplomatic breakthrough, the original Kissinger is still the better bet.
Former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and McFaul, dressed in suits, stand and speak to each other in the Red Square in Moscow beneath a cloudless blue sky. A group of photographers stand in the background and take photos of them. Behind them rise the colorful domes of the Kremlin.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Michael McFaul (right), then the U.S. ambassador to Russia, speak in Red Square in Moscow on May 7, 2013.Mladen Antonov via Getty Images
This all raises the question of what bets the United States should make in the first place. To McFaul, it is time to fly the flag of democracy once again and combat the “deadly cocktail of autocracy and power” that threatens U.S. security.
McFaul is a true believer in what he is selling—his use of phrases like “liberal international order” and “the right side of history” is frequent and unironic. What’s more, if he is positioning himself for future government office, he does not act like it. (The book includes a robust defense of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the rare policy opposed by Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Donald Trump, and Ted Cruz.) He insists that power is not everything in global politics; leaders and citizens matter too. He ends with a plea for confidence and unity among Americans as the essential ingredients to renew democracy.
It is a powerful message. But it is missing the one other necessary ingredient whose value policymakers have learned the hard way: humility.
Promoting democracy was tough for the United States even when the going was good. No one likes to be lectured, particularly when, given the realities of great-power politics, the lecturer will inevitably prove guilty of hypocrisy. But promoting democracy at a moment when the United States’ own democracy is under assault by its duly elected head of state is a different matter altogether.
McFaul does not ignore the issue. Rather, he says Trump’s successor can pick up the mantle where it fell. But if the United States survives as a real democracy, Trump’s successor will never be able to guarantee that he or she will not in turn be replaced by another Trump-like figure.
The United States has now elected Trump twice. For all of Biden’s remonstrations that Trump is “not who we are,” there is no denying that the MAGA movement is a central thread in the country’s tapestry. Voters right now are supremely dissatisfied. They have evicted the party in the White House in three straight elections, which has not happened in over 100 years. As a result, it would be a good time for policymakers in the U.S. to step back and, as football coaches like to say, control the controllables. In a word, it is time for realism. Not realism in the theoretical sense of believing relative power determines everything, not realism in the normative sense that self-interest should drive policy, but rather realism in the practical sense of being realistic about what can be done.
Notably, in his chapter on the lessons of the Cold War and the dangers of overreach, McFaul sets out five core U.S. foreign policy interests: Protect the homeland, deter attacks on allies, stop Russian aggression against Ukraine and elsewhere in Europe, prevent war over Taiwan, and preserve freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. This is an excellent distillation of the interests that matter right now, and none requires promoting democracy. McFaul links Russia and China’s aggressive actions to their autocratic character and identifies this as an underlying driver of conflict. But that doesn’t make it any easier to democratize Russia or China. The generational difficulty of securing McFaul’s five core interests alone suggests they are more than enough to occupy policymakers. And they are what the American people—angry, exhausted, and searching for answers—would support right now.
In the afterword to his book Lenin’s Tomb, David Remnick recounts his visit in the early 1990s with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The prominent Soviet dissident and Nobel Laureate had lived in exile in Vermont for nearly two decades and, with the end of the Cold War, was preparing to return home. Remnick asked him his hopes for Russia. Solzhenitsyn, Remnick wrote, responded that what he hoped for “was not a new empire, not the resuscitation of a great power, but simply the development of a ‘normal country.’” A normal country. It is a worthy aspiration these days for Russia, for China, and—after a decade of upheaval—for the United States.
