YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael McFaul

lines on the record

90

first

2018-05-24

most recent

2018-05-24

sittings or episodes

1

sources

podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

1. “So, I got to keep my head down now, but the hundreds of thousands of people that were out there for May 6th, their preferences haven't changed. And we're bad at predicting the future. By the way, so is the intelligence community at predicting political change. So political scientists aren't bad. But in the long run, you mentioned pundit. Not to mention pundits. In the long run, I think change will happen, and I think it'll be in a more pro-Western democratic way. I just don't know when that long run begins.”

   2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “And everybody's hand went up. They were all there. And then there was another one being planned. And I asked, well, how many are planning to go? And just a few hands went up. And I must have been reading it on my face because a woman interrupted and said, you know, Mr. Ambassador, don't misread what you just saw. I'm an engineer. I got two children. I'm the breadwinner in my family. I can't afford to be arrested. Because they've got arrested and we're in jail after May 6th. But she said, don't think for a minute that my preferences about this regime have changed.”

   2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “One of the great things about being ambassador is you're required to go to various businesses and meet Russians and there was a very important demonstration, May 6, 2012. Some people got arrested and some of them are still into jail to this day. There was some violence. And I was at one of these high-tech companies. By the way, it looked exactly like Silicon Valley. They're all sitting on their big pillars and free food and all that stuff. I said, how many of you are at that demonstration?”

   2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “But three things we know, and I want to maybe good place to end. Let me talk as a political scientist and also anecdotally as an ambassador. One thing political scientists, we know, is that charismatic dictators or autocrats, their regimes do not last as long as, say, one-party systems. And Putin is most certainly that. And so I think after him, that system falls apart pretty quickly. Number two, what we know from social science is something called modernization theory. And the more well-to-do a society, the more educated a society, more urban it is, the more likely it is to push for democratic change. And that's a trend you see around the world for 200 years. I don't see Russia being somehow so unique that those pressures don't reemerge as they did at the end of the 80s. I think that's going to happen there. Russia is a European country.”

   2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “I don't see a scenario under which while Putin is there, that system falls apart. And part of it might be because I used to work on Southern Africa. I used to work on Zimbabwe and Angola, two places that perform miserably for decades and yet dictate on for a long time. So just because you see negative economic trends doesn't mean the dictatorship falls.”

   2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “Well, I'm pessimistic in the short run, incredibly optimistic in the long run. So in the short run, Putinism as a political system, I think, is pretty sophisticated. It's not a crude dictatorship, it works effectively, and he squashed the opposition, he's crushed them, including friends of mine who've been squashed, who are in exile as a result of that, and some of my friends have been killed. Boris Nimsov was a good friend of mine, killed in 2015.”

   2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “And then that was the last one I was going to get to. So, what they do, what the Kremlin does, Is they create leverage with all kinds of people inside Russia. That's the story I know best, right? But they do it in other European countries where they say, you know, let me give you a good deal. And you say, well, what do I need to give you back in return? You say, oh, we'll work that out later down the road. Putin does that all the time. One of the things he did when I was ambassador, he declared that all government officials had to divest their assets abroad, and some of them have hundreds of millions of dollars invested abroad. That's the official rule. But every individual, he can talk to and say, okay, for you, Valodya, I'm going to cut you a special deal, but that means you're beholden to him.”

   2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “Pretty compact in there. That's what we did, and we did it rightly so because anything you do in that hotel. Is monitored. Anything I did in Spasso House was recorded, emails, phone calls, movements, everything is monitored. They have tremendous capacity. What they picked up, I don't know. Were they gathering compromot on everybody that they can who are Americans? Absolutely yes. What about...”

   2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “The Ritz-Carlton. You and I stayed there with the president. I don't know if you remember. Yes, you do remember because you were in it. Because there's a photo that Pete Sousa took. We built this submarine-like structure inside one of the suites so that we could have a confidential conversation with the president. And you're standing with your head down because it's...”

   2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “Trump was. But then we get into the gray zon Did they make contact with the campaign to try to provide additional information that might help them? The answer to that is also yes. Natalia Versonitska, who I've never met before, but I know that system well. That meeting does not take place in Putin's Russia without it being closely coordinated at the highest levels. So that happened. That is a fact. Then there's another piece. Now we're in where I know how Russia operates. I don't know if they use these techniques with the United States. But two more things that they do. One, they gather compromise on everybody.”

    2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “Let me tell you precisely what I know second, what I kind of know because I know how they operate and then what I don't know. And I want to make sure we're clear on those things because I think sometimes we get ahead of our skis. So did Putin want Trump to win? The answer, that's absolutely yes. Trump said things that Putin wanted changed in foreign policy. He said he's going to lift sanctions, look into recognizing Crimea, blow up NATO, and he didn't say anything about democracy and human rights. Secretary Clinton said exactly the opposite. It's very rational that Putin would want him to win. Second, did Putin take actions to help him win? Absolutely yes. He stole data from the DNC in Podesta and he got it published in ways to help Trump. That's clear. He used his propaganda platforms to help Trump and to hurt Clinton. That's absolutely clear.”

    2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “Was the greatest job I've ever had It was awesome. One, because the honor of representing our country there, we had this fight one time with my bodyguards, all the stuff is happening. I had some death threats against me. And they're like, well, Mr. Ambassador, we think we should take the flag down from your car so that we could travel a little more quietly around town. And I'm looking at him, Sergei is his name. And I'm like, you got to be kidding me, man. We're giant black Cadillac with these two big suburbans. You don't think they know who we are? We're putting the flag out and we're going to drive around town. But, you know, people don't understand the job. Like my job was to host Herbie Hancock at my house and have 500 of my friends come to a concert at my house is big enough to have 500 people there. I hosted the NBA one day. My kids love that. We had 12 NBA stars.”

    2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “Exactly. So there's a pattern Arab Spring. We're responding, you know, we're reacting. He thinks we're behind it. Happens in Russia. He thinks we're behind it. And then happens in Ukraine again November 2013, February 2014. His guy gets swept away. He thinks we're behind it. And I think that disagreement was the conflict. But I want to make sure before we end, that's the high politics.”

    2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “Putin definitely didn't like that phrase regional power. But I think there were bigger things at play. I think fundamentally the end of the reset was Massive demonstrations first in the Arab Spring, which”

    2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “Completely, completely. And his one of his campaign advisors, he told me very bluntly, you all, your business has a reputation of being a little bit cynical about these things, and most certainly that crowd who I've known for 30 years in Russia, they're pretty cynical people. And he said to me, his name was Sarkov. Is Sarkov? He said to me, I went to see him. He said, Mike, you are manna from heaven for the campaign. You're the poster child. You look like an American. And all the things we were just talking about earlier, David, that's part of my history, right? So I was there when these demonstrations were happening in 1991, 20 years earlier, the year of the Soviet Union collapsed.”

    2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “So that stuff was not pleasant. And the big politics was not pleasant. We were moving in a negative direction. Putin wanted us as an enemy and there's nothing we could do.”

    2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “By anybody's definition, and how do you deal with it? So I actually have some friends at Google. I got it taken down from YouTube. But then it appeared on other platforms the next day. So what do you do? You get on Twitter and say, I'm not a pedophile. How do you deal with this information? Yeah, I could have used your advice. You should have gone.”

    2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “Well, yes and no. So all that stuff was horrible. The day somebody floated a video accusing me of a pedophile, that's a bad day. By anybody.”

    2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “The principle for that meeting is Bill Burns, right? She hated the strong word. She never liked traveling with President Obama because that meant she would sit as a planted plant, right? And not to be the principal. But the context was different. And I remember I just gotten there. My one contribution to the list was let's invite a communist, Sergei Kalashnikov is his name, and he came just to make it not look like it was such an opposition thing. But, you know, at the time, it felt maybe too edgy. We probably shouldn't have done it. But even before that meeting, David, they were already running these hit pieces on me and us. So if it wouldn't have been that meeting, there would have been something else.”

    2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “But it was a different context. That's your point. And the reset policy, one of the planks of it was dual track engagement. So anytime I traveled when I was at the White House with the vice president, with Secretary Clinton, Bill Burns, we would always see civil society. That was our policy. What had changed was those demonstrations. And the meeting, by the way, was Bill Burns's meeting. I'm the potted plant. That's what Clinton used to call it, where you put your hands over each other and you just sit there and say nothing because”

    2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “Well, yes and no. You'll remember because you were there, because I have the photos to prove it. We had a similar meeting in the country.”

    2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “And for the rest of my days as ambassador, that was my fate. I was portrayed on television in a pretty regular basis as being sent by Barack Obama to foment revolution against Putin.”

    2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “I have no doubt that those things are related. He thought that we are interfering in his election, so when he had the chance for payback, he took it, particularly against her. I remember that statement, right? I was the guy I cleared it at the White House as we're going through and their entourage were off in Lithuania or somewhere and Jake sent it to me. Jake Sullivan, her advisor for foreign policy at the time, it was a Saturday. I remember my son played football at the time in Maryland. I'm like looking for a quiet place to talk to them. The wind's blowing. And I read this thing and it seemed pretty innocuous to me, right? But not to him. Not to Putin.”

    2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “It was nothing personal, but he had a lot of stuff personal against the president. So we spent some very quality time in the Marriott Executive on Friendship Heights waiting to get out of purgatory there. But by the time I got there, two big things had changed. As you just said one of'em, Putin was now running for president, and two months later he becomes president, he wins that election, but two massive demonstrations in the streets of Russia, sparked by a falsified election in December 2011. And, you know, we had nothing to do with that, but that wasn't Putin's view. He blamed us for it. He blamed Obama. He blamed Clinton. She made a statement back then that he signaled out that he said that was a call to the opposition to come out and demonstrate. And when I got there, then they came up with...”

    2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “To keep your tenure and your job. And that was always our plan. And my family was ready to go back. They hadn't seen me a lot those years working at the White House. And those, when I told Tom first, he's like, that's a horrible idea. We're doing so much history here. We're moving in the right direction. And then he said, hey, I talked to the boss, and he also thinks that's a really bad idea. And so that's when this idea of going to Moscow, staying on the team but working Russia, that's when that happened at the height of cooperation with Russia. That's when we just got Medvedev to sign off on our military operation in Libya. That's how cooperative things were. By the time I get there, deciding going through the review process internally, then going through the Senate confirmation things because I'm in Chicago. I remember Senator Kirk had one of his holds on me.”

    2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “Well, first of all, I want to remind your listeners that the decision to send me to Moscow, that conversation starts with the presidents and Tom Donalan, if you remember National Security Advisor, Dennis McDonough. That's like February, March 2011, because I'm a professor. Most professors spend two years in the government have to go home. And oftentimes you have to go home.”

    2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “Osama bin Laden. I was in the Oval Office with the president. He called Nazarbaya from Kazakhstan to do one more enhancement to the northern distribution network because we, you know, something big was going to happen the next day. We were worried that the Pakistanis might close off those routes.”

    2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “Start treaty, rush into the WTO. And all of these things, I want to point out, they're not just kind of marginal namby pamby photo ops about let's hold hands in sing kumbaya. We're talking about core national security interests for the United States at the time. Afghanistan, just a minute on that. People don't understand how important that was. When we came into the White House, over 90% of our supplies to Afghanistan went through Pakistan. We had plans to occasionally conviate the sovereign to go after terrorists. You can't do that if you have 90% of your supplies going through there. So the Indiana was called Northern Distribution Network. We developed that and American soldiers were flying through Russian airspace. And that was important for the day that we killed Osama bin Laden. In fact, the day before we killed Osama.”

    2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “It's a good read, and there's a lot of footnotes because I'm an academic. So don't be daunted. Don't be frightened by that 500 page”

    2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “And he said, You may not remember or may not know, but I was against that war long before it was popular to be against it. And that was the moment where I thought. Putin was kind of listening to Obama and thinking, well, maybe this guy is different, maybe things will be a different trajectory.”

    2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “Exactly. And I think they're doing the same with Trump, by the way Don't criticize Trump, but the deep state we got to go after. But when they get to Iraq, President Obama said, you know, he told us about how horrible Iraq was and what a stupid mistake it was. President Obama said, I agree. And that was a little jarring for Putin. He'd never heard an American say that. If you think about who you'd be doing.”

    2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “He's very good at this. I've seen him now up close in these kind of meetings. He floats out these little details that just give you a sense that you're dealing with a guy with all this secret information But on a rock at just one important point, because I write about it in the book, they got to that point in the conversation. By the way, Putin kind of left President Bush off to the side. He likes President Bush. It was the deep state. It was the Bush administration. He was going off Africa. To this day, that's the way he thinks.”

    2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “They would have done luckily, Putin went on for three more hours, I think. Well, we both, then the president, you know, they went back and forth, but he did, he was loaded for bear, and that was the moment.”

    2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “Because Glad to have provided that for you. But on the schedule, it said this meeting is to last for an hour. And my job after it was over, I was going to be the SAO that day, the senior administration official that was going to read out the meeting to the White House press corps. And we're 55 minutes in, and our guy hasn't said a word. And I'm thinking, what am I going to tell? You know these people.”

    2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “Talking to too many of our former colleagues because I didn't want them to take the edge off of what I wanted to say. And Syria, there were some that were sensitive. I wanted to make sure, at least to make sure I was representing the president's viewpoint. But that's what happened. And just let me, another story about that. So I'm brand new to the government, just like you, by the way, only six months in. This is my, I'm in charge of this summit, right? I'm the Russia guy at the NSC, scared to death. My first ride on Air Force 1 was horrible because I didn't sleep a minute. It's 11 hour flight because I'm worried about 4,000 details and all the things that we did, including the civil society things that we did that you helped me with, my friend, to keep on the calendar. That was very important. But we get out to this meeting. I slept like...”

    2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “So they said That's right. I remember Putin. But we were really late because, well, just another foot. So I'm glad our stories, because I write about that in the book. I wrote this book without...”

    2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “Where I heard this most vividly was actually on a trip you and I were on together in July 2009 when we went to Moscow with President Obama. And in his meeting, you know, out at Putin's house.”

    2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “He did, and he even wrote eerily an op-ed in the New York Times months before warning what might happen if we're attacked. And so that day he tried to call the president. He got Condy on the phone. So I don't think he got through to the president. But basically, he said, we're in the common fight here. We have these common enemies. And for the first months of that, he was helping us, particularly in Afghanistan. He knew the Northern Alliance better than we did. So when he helped with that, he helped set up bases in Central Asia for us. And he thought that we were in a different place. And then there was a series of events, you know, NATO expansion, color revolutions, but the Iraq war was definitely one of them, where he just felt betrayed by President Bush.”

    2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “Yes Huge huge moment so there were moments and we won't go through them all where well let's let's start in the good news for Bush his reset right we have our reset but his reset with Putin was September 11th 2001 Because”

    2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “And so he was going to try to lessen the blow. So I don't think that quip was a mistake. The actual words were a mistake, probably. That was too much. But his strategy was, I'm going to make him feel comfortable. I'm a business. So he doesn't feel threatened by the way he feels threatened. And just a coda to that all, the next day I was quoted in the New York Times saying that was a rookie mistake. That was on page one of the New York Times. I never briefed the president again. Yes. I did brief the vice president. I did see Condoleezza Rice and everybody else, but that was, you're not allowed to say that.”

    2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “And then he said, because we're going to have to deal with the Chinese at some point. And then I couldn't tell. Did he accept my argument or was he really just thinking a more balance of power political terms? But it was clear to me at that meeting that he wanted Putin to feel comfortable in their first meeting. And I'm reminded of that given what our current president says these days about Putin. But the reason was that he was going to pull out of the anti-ballistic missile treaty.”

    2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “Five of us outsiders and then him, the vice president, Condy, other, they're a big team because this was his first trip abroad. So we spent the first hour on Europe. We pivoted to Russia. And we had a pretty engaging argument about how to deal with Russia, the essence of which was Had a big debate back then whether Russia's powerful or not, right? That was what we were bantering about. And I said to the president, that's the wrong question. It doesn't matter. The real question is whether they're inside our tent or out. They're inside our tent, we might want them to be powerful, by the way, if they were our ally, our democratic ally. And if they're outside, then even a weak Russia can be a real problem for us. It can be a spoiler for us. And he said to me, you're absolutely right, Mike. I remember him saying that.”

    2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “He's known for that, and he made that striking to me. Then he gave us a little tour of the residents, by the way. That was interesting. I'd never seen any of those rooms before and made some jokes about various rooms and how they used the Lincoln bedroom differently and the queen room that his mom likes to say. And so he's a very jovial guy. We talked about baseball. He knew more about Stanford baseball than I did. And then we settle down. I think you would know better.”

    2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “At the time, right? I remember we first met in the Roosevelt room, which you know well, and got our little briefing about how it was going to go down. And then we went over to the map room and waited for the president. And I remember. He at the meeting was scheduled to start at 120, and he walked in right at 120. No.”

    2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “Yeah, so I saw maybe two weeks before he said that. It was a meeting in the residence, by the way. So just these little details are interesting, right? It was just five of us. Kandy arranged it.”

    2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “Wasn't there? And the Bush administration was not paying attention either, right? They remember the Secretary of State then becomes the campaign advisor. There's no Jim Baker. There's no critical mass of people focused on this issue. Now, if they were here, they would say, oh, had we given them more money, it would have all gone down and the train and it wouldn't have been effective. But I have a different view. I think we missed a big opportunity there.”

    2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “One candidate was saying it's the economy stupid and saying that H.W. Bush was spending too much time on this foreign policy stuff. He later changes his view, President Clinton. But when he becomes president, by the time he becomes president, my friends are already thrown out of the government. Like the moment for deep economic reform was missed. So that, I think, also played a role. One other piece on that. I remember from those debates, some of us argued, and I most certainly was in this camp, that we needed to take some of the edge off of this economic depression and have a social safety net for Russians enduring this. And the political argument back, you know, was how can we build a social safety net for Russians when we don't have it for Americans? And that really constrained the amount of resources we were going to spend on their transition.”

    2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “Is going to be rocky, but there's no alternative. That was the idea of the time. That's the first thing. Second thing, there was no threat to the east of Russia to animate us to do more for them. So after World War II, there was a threat to the east to Germany and Japan called the Soviet Union. So that's why we have a Marshall Plan, because we're worried about those guys coming in. We should have had a Marshall Plan-like structure put in place, in my view, but we didn't because there was no threat looming out there. Had the Chinese been bigger and more threatening, maybe we would have done that. And then third, there's these things called presidential elections that you know more about than I do. But the year 1992 coincided with that first year of Russian independence. And, you know,”

    2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “But I do think we made a mistake. I mean, a couple of things I would say. One, we didn't understand how hard it was going to be. Remember, this is the end of history. Everybody's going to be a democracy, right? Fukuyama wrote this piece into history at the time. My colleague at Stanford.”

    2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “As well Communism. We had won the Cold War, yes. Well, like I say, Russians and Ukrainians together with us. And I would add people throughout the former Warsaw Pact, we want it together. But I do think, I mean, it's hard to run the, you know, I run the counterfactuals in the book from time to time as a method to tell the story. But I do, I moved back to Russia in the summer of 1992 to open the NDI office because we were invited to come then. And that's when we standarded handing out leaflets about how to win elections. We use the Republican handbook, by the way. We translated that into Russian, not the Democratic one for reasons I don't know. But we literally translated their materials and handed it out.”

    2018-05-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 245 — Michael McFaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source