Quotes from Michael McFaul

A new ideological struggle has emerged between Russia and the West, not between communism and capitalism but between democracy and autocracy. Putin also has championed a new set of populist, nationalist, conservative ideas antithetical to the liberal, international order anchored by the United States. Putinism now has admirers in Western democracies, just as communism did during the Cold War. Europe is divided again between East and West; the line has just moved farther east.

While assessing the agreement's ultimate success would have to wait several years, the JCPOA ranked at the time as one of the biggest foreign policy achievements of Obama's presidency.

On the metro home that night, I struggled with a dilemma that would haunt me for decades. Was I an activist or an academic?

Quoted in the New York Times two days later, I called Bush's remarks a "rookie mistake." I went on: "I can understand the strategy on rapport, but it went too far . . . I think there is plenty of good reason not to trust President Putin. This is a man who was trained to lie."16 I was never invited back to brief President Bush again. Years later, during Obama's

America's greatest national security nightmare would be the emergence of an authoritarian, imperialist Russian regime supported by a thriving market economy."13 A decade later, that's exactly what happened.

1 In this book, I evaluate both American and Russian leaders—their ideas, decisions, and behavior—by how well they succeeded in achieving what in my view were desirable and attainable objectives.

She told me that the call had been a deliberate move to let all of Russian officialdom know about her views on my performance. As she wrote in her memoir, "I made a point of calling him on an open line one night, and speaking very clearly so all the eavesdropping Russian spies could hear, I told him what a good job he was doing.

Putin clearly had signaled that engagement with us was not in his portfolio. Yet we understood from that session that he remained the primary decision maker in Russia.