While the transformative character and resilience of American democracy will likely see off all foreign autocracies, the greater threat comes from within.
Alexis de Tocqueville, the great French prophet of democracy in America, misread the impact of its politics on its foreign policy. He claimed that the cacophonous nature of debate would weaken the nation in the face of coordinated assault from centralised powers. The obverse turned out to be true. Dictators, monarchs, tyrants and autocrats, from George III to Ali Khamenei, were each in turn superseded by the raucous American republic. Democracy, it turned out, was endowed with a deep strength its opponents lacked.
American foreign policy works.
Democracy meant competition and the interrogation of ideas, invariably leading to the selection of superior ones. Autocracy relied on the leader always being right. When he wasn’t, his regime usually collapsed. America, in contrast, has become rich and powerful without recourse to successive and recurrent great men. Such characters are rare in US history. And yet the Republic went from being, at its birth, the equivalent of New Zealand today to the most important nation in world history. Something about how it makes its foreign policy enabled that rise. The system—the machine that would go of itself—turned out to be more consequential than whichever president happened to be atop it.
American foreign policy works. From geostrategic irrelevance 250 years ago to the nation on which the world turns—with only about five indisputably great presidents in that time. So, in assessing where America and the world is at—the focus of Michael McFaul’s big new book—we must grapple with the character of the system that produces its foreign policy. We must, in short, factor ideology back into the accounting of American success and failure, then and now.
This is what Autocrats vs. Democrats seeks to do: explain US advantages, even during a ‘new global disorder’ (McFaul’s subtitle), with reference to its superior ideology. This is a fundamentally optimistic book. America has the internal, even psychological, resources that its opponents each lack. Democracy will prevail. That was the lesson of the last century. McFaul is determined to mine it for how to win in this one.
His essential guide is the Cold War. The first half of the book compares that struggle with the one today. Then, the Soviet opponent was militarily strong but economically weak. Today, China is strong on both metrics. Then, China and Russia were split. Today, they are closer. Then, the opponent agitated for global revolution. Today, the opponent has narrowly regional and loose ideological aspirations.
What is the same is American democracy, at least nominally. The regimes foisted on Russian and Chinese men and women have variously lurched from tyranny, to famine, to extinction, to state capitalism. Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are products of these dislocations. The Russian leader saw the Soviet Union lose the Cold War and still has PTSD from its ensuing collapse. Xi was a child of the Cultural Revolution; his father was repeatedly struggle-sessioned and humiliated. The communist leader projects calm authority but is haunted by the chaos that characterises so much Chinese history.
McFaul’s point is that the inherent, historical, psychological and, crucially, ideological advantages American presidents enjoy over their opponents is a considerable one. Use it. How? The author offers several important prescriptions, which I will come to. They carry weight less because of his academic training—he is a longtime professor at Stanford University—and more because he has a lived experience of America’s opponents. (Yes, I distrust that concept too. In McFaul’s case, though, it informs especially his analysis of Russia.)
EXILED BY PUTIN
McFaul was Barack Obama’s Ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014, after helping shape the administration’s failed ‘reset’ policy with Russia while serving on the National Security Council. Not quite exiled, he nevertheless upset Putin sufficiently to make his posting untenable:
The central myth Putin and his propagandists advanced was that I was a fomenter, an agitator, an orchestrator of color revolutions who had been sent to Russia to do what other American agents had pulled off in Serbia in 2000, Georgia in 2003, and Ukraine in 2004. The fact that I had written about these post-communist democratic breakthroughs and had also written a book titled Russia’s Unfinished Revolution was twisted as evidence to prove my passion for regime change in Russia.
His experience of China was less visceral, less lived. He had no posting there. His grasp is mostly academic. He is more forgiving of the CCP than of Putin’s regime. Indeed, because the book unites Beijing and Moscow as the titular autocrats, there is a tendency toward conflation. He overstates their ‘forever’ partnership and treats ‘autocrats’ (and ‘democrats’ as well) as too unified. Some of this might be explained by the binary Cold War he uses to guide democrats today.
COLD WAR LESSONS
How can that long twilight struggle be recycled? First, don’t “exaggerate threats”. The USSR was much politically weaker than its missile power led Western leaders to believe. Ditto China today:
Overstatements about Chinese intentions and capabilities echo similar exaggerations of Soviet power and aims during the Cold War. American strategy for dealing with the real China challenge will be more successful if we do not make the Cold War mistake of overestimating the threat again.
“China,” declares the author, “does not seek ‘nothing less than world domination’”—as a recent hawkish account has it.
Second, avoid “overreach”—one of the author’s favourite concepts. The art of containment lay in choosing battles wisely. The actual practice of containment, according to McFaul, became about poor choices, in Vietnam especially:
Great powers make mistakes when they overreach with their ideological missions in ways that undermine their core security and economic interests.
That is sound advice but hardly a revelation.
Third, alliances worked. Do not forsake them. In the Cold War, the United States created the deepest, richest, most enduring economic and security alliance since Rome. Now is the moment to reenergise it. God knows, America’s alliance partners want it to.
Fourth, prosperity worked. It was the key metric global communism was unable to match. American productivity was a beacon for migrants and built the greatest consumer society in history. The immiseration of life under Cold War communism was in stark contrast to America’s booming generation. Trump’s tariffing of America’s wealth now turns that lesson on its head, argues McFaul. Prosperity is a key prop of America’s ideology.
Fifth, and relatedly, soft power worked. Communists consistently failed to find an equivalent form. The Kremlin knew it could not control its satrapies in East Europe with a kindness doctrine. Instead, they brutally repressed them for more than four decades. American soft power, however, was a constant source of inspiration for citizens in the Warsaw Pact. When communism fell, they rushed to join the American imperium.
Each of these lessons is open to some caveating. I’m not persuaded that the battles of the Cold War, including Vietnam, constitute overreach. I do not accuse McFaul of fetishising alliances. I would suggest that the welfarism to which they became prone has inhibited the bold ideological action he demands of contemporary democratic power. His faith in prosperity tempts an elision of the defenestration of the American worker, a key feature of 21st century America’s economic and cultural history.
MCFAUL’S OVERREACH
While I would defend stoutly the author’s ideological determinism (that “regime type … matters”) my concern is that we have lost faith in democracy as an ideology to the extent that McFaul’s prescriptions, cribbed from the Cold War, no longer have domestic purchase. We, the West, the United States, Australia, the European Union are not up for the fight and don’t believe we have a superior system.
This is complicated by a Donald Trump who simultaneously seeks to make America great while also wanting to make it normal—a nation pursuing its interests as all nations must. If Trump does disdain American exceptionalism, it seems to me hard to renew his nation’s global moral purpose, as McFaul requires.
The author is agnostic on the two-term president. He is not a Never Trumper and argues here that Trump’s goals of a strong economy and greater defence spending are key ingredients of US renewal. What he condemns is the gratuitous treatment of allies, and thus the weakening of alliances, the erosion of global capitalism via tariffs, and the retreat from soft power by, for example, reducing the number of diplomats.
What he condemns is Trump’s gratuitous treatment of allies.
He can even summon up a faux rage over Trump’s shuttering of USAID. This agency had long ago prioritised a progressive social agenda over core US national interests. McFaul spends too much time defending it here. This invites a deeper weakness, certainly a gap, in McFaul’s analysis.
“The erosion of the quality of democracy within older liberal democracies, especially in the United States”, is the book’s chief charge against Trump. “America’s polarized division at home coupled with the erosion of democratic institutions and norms are greater than in any period during the Cold War.”
McFaul rightly privileges alliances. But these are sustained on ideological convictions. The West is now so riven on questions of its historical guilt that it has trouble combining to insure a democratic future. If he pursued his own logic, which I broadly share, the author would analyse Western ennui and the rise of anti-Westernism (from Palestinianism to climate catastrophism) in our universities and other sites of cultural production. He would take on the noisy claims of ‘decolonisers’ and tell them they are helping hand liberal civilisation to the great autocracies of the modern era.
Instead, McFaul castigates J. D. Vance for telling Europe’s elite that “what I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values—values shared with the United States of America.” The author is more animated by Trump’s designs on Greenland than he is preoccupied with the green catechism that has taken over so much debate in the West. The book is too silent on the deeper cultural shifts that have made Putin and certainly Xi merely proponents of an alternative to democracy. He ends up calling for boiler plate Democratic policies—like “reducing economic inequality”—rather than cultural renewal.
It is unclear to me how “ending partisan redistricting for congressional seats, eliminating primaries that reward extremist candidates, and enhancing campaign-finance transparency” will put the fear of God back into Putin and Xi. McFaul becomes a better guide to the ideological excesses of America’s opponents than to the wokery of American society.
He assumes polarization and identity politics will resolve themselves, just as the dislocations of the 1960s-70s were similarly healed. Ronald Reagan takes some credit for that. He replaced the gloomy moralism of Jimmy Carter with a bold reassertion of American power as a city on a hill. Trump is not playing that role, and his Democratic opponents run a mile from claiming any American moral superiority. Relativists all.
Perhaps the author should give Donald Trump some of the same praise for challenging the latest declinism. He doesn’t. Trump is, of course, an imperfect vehicle for American renewal. He does at least bring a braggadocio confidence to the American promise. A positive psychology counts.
George F. Kennan, the great interpreter of Soviet power, who gave us the winning containment doctrine of the Cold War, believed the power of example matters as much as the projection of power. If America could develop a robust psychological health, if it demonstrated the self-evident economic and political superiority of its system, its enemies would collapse exhausted. And they did. Or, in the case of China, adapted to a set of trading rules engineered in the West and enforced by the United States.
McFaul is a Kennanite. Like Kennan, his formative diplomatic posting was in Moscow. But like so many of us who study the United States, he isn’t quite sure how to make that renewal possible. Is Trump part of it?
LIBERAL INTERNATIONALISM REDUX
The book assumes liberal internationalism is fundamentally correct—rather than proving it.
McFaul starts from the premise that liberal democracy and the US-led international order are self-evidently superior, without seriously interrogating failures of that order. NATO expansion, globalisation, Libya, Ukraine, the Iran nuclear deal … McFaul was part of the policymaking establishment during many of the more problematic episodes of US foreign policy. He never reckons with the consequences of these actions.
Rather, McFaul maintains the passion of a true believer. His long association with Russia, as a student and then as a diplomat, did not rupture his faith in its inevitable democratisation. A Russian colleague of mine, who had grown up in the dermokratiya (‘shitocracy’) of Yeltsin’s Russia, described McFaul as having “drunk the kool-aid”. The author really believed America could democratise post-communist Russia. That failure can be measured today in the Ukrainian body count. His liberalism is not wrong. It is incomplete.
He is surely right to ask which nations bleed with Russia? Belarus and North Korea. What if Russia’s war machine is a better predictor of how autocracies fight? The US has significant freedom of action if that is the case. “The regime type—the kind of government—of great powers matters.” America has a better one. It is certainly more attractive to immigrants than anything Putin or Xi have come up with. People see themselves in America. McFaul might have made more of this pole of attraction to explain US prospects.
He is right to observe that this new cold war favours the West more than did the actual one. There is no ideological challenge now. Islamism is loud and bothersome because it would vanish were it not. The PRC needs capitalism and Western markets. Russia needs democrats to buy its gas.
REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL
Fortune favours the right ideology. It is McFaul’s unifying claim that the US remains in possession of this ideology; China and Russia do not. Indeed, the historical ideologies of these rivals have been human disasters, from purges and famines to tyranny and collapse. The American ideology, in contrast, is celebrating its 250th birthday. It has weathered civil war, economic depression, military defeat to become the freest and wealthiest ideological experiment in history. The idea worked. The market for US power remains enormous.
The richest countries are still the democracies.
It has delivered a global playing field that favours the United States. Military predominance remains an enduring feature of American power. Putin can’t even invade and subdue a neighbour. Compare his botched regime change with Trump’s in Venezuela or his decapitation of the Iranian theocracy. American economic power has proved resilient. As McFaul notes, US GDP per capita is today nearly US$90k. In Russia and China, it hovers around US$14k. And the author is right to emphasis the remarkable resource that alliances represent, that America’s partners are desperate for it to stay in the global game. The PRC has Pyongyang in its corner; the US has friends prepared to bleed with it across the last century.
The richest countries are still the democracies. We get to do turmoil and survive, prosper even. The Soviet Union could not. It collapsed months after its retreat from Afghanistan. In 2021, America also left that nation ignominiously. The United States did not fall; it re-elected a president promising a return to greatness. There is a transformative character to American political development. It can roll with punches, come back stronger in ways autocracies just cannot.
AN ABUNDANT FAITH IN THEORIES
This book is not wrong in any significant way. But it does not revolutionise our understanding either. McFaul corrects Tocqueville; he has not written an equivalent Democracy in the World. McFaul reads like a revival of 1990s–2000s liberal internationalism. It is less a seminal reinterpretation of global disorder than an energetic, and lengthy, exercise in nostalgia. The centrist Foreign Policy journal called it a “playbook for a world gone by”. That assessment seems about right to me.
Do we know the titular autocrats better for this firsthand account? A little. I am not sure the revelation that Putin is a Castroesque windbag is a new one. McFaul does not have a string of fascinating anecdotes about the Russia leader because Putin is just not that fascinating. He has a conspiracy theorist’s view of history and has no intellectual range, outside of a romantic Russian imperialist tradition. How interesting can such a leader be? Important? Yes. Engrossing? No.
Barack Obama was, of course, a supposedly deeply reflective, Harvard-educated intellectual. Despite McFaul’s best efforts to portray his boss as a great president, Obama’s cosmopolitan mind did not match Putin’s darker Machiavellianism. Russia invaded Ukraine first in 2014, under Obama, and again in 2022, under Joe Biden (in Obama’s ‘third term’). The alliance and international law mantra of the Democrats afforded democratic Ukraine little protection. McFaul needs to offer a fuller accounting of this failure by the men who gave him a diplomatic job.
Ideological determinists were right in the Cold War and remain right today. Great power rivalry has important economic components. But its essential fuel is ideological competition. McFaul exaggerates our capacity to play that game. He is right to outline what the rules of that game are.
Henry Kissinger was an exception that proved the rule: not many academics get to become great statesmen. Michael McFaul calls himself “a social scientist, a historian, and a former policymaker”. Having read and enjoyed his big book, I do wonder whether his academic disposition rather overwhelms his diplomatic pragmatism. This is a man with an abundant faith in theories—like liberal internationalism—but who lacks a clear understanding of why they fail in the real word. This makes him very American.
Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne and a Member of the IPA.
This article from the Winter 2026 edition of the IPA Review is written by Professor Timothy Lynch.
