Autocrats vs. Democrats, by Michael McFaul — Summary

Synopsis

McFaul’s central thesis is that the rivalry between autocracies and democracies is the structuring conflict of the twenty-first century — not a passing geopolitical conjuncture but a long-term ideological contest in which the United States and its democratic allies face China under Xi Jinping and Russia under Putin. The book argues that this rivalry is not a new Cold War in the strict sense: the analogy is partly useful (there is bipolarity, ideological contestation, and rival visions of world order) but fundamentally misleading (there is deep economic interdependence, the democratic camp is internally fractured, and neither authoritarian power seeks world revolution). The practical conclusion is that the West can win this competition — but only if it understands it precisely and resists both panic and complacency.

The argument is built in three movements. The first is historical: McFaul examines three centuries of US-Russia and US-China relations to show that present patterns of cooperation and conflict depend on three variables — the balance of power, regime type, and the choices of individual leaders — and that none of them is destiny. The second is diagnostic: a detailed analysis of comparative power (military, economic, technological), of the ideologies exported by Moscow and Beijing, and of the erosion of the liberal international order. The third is prescriptive: a grand strategy that combines robust deterrence, revitalized alliances, renewed democracy promotion, and strategic discrimination — learning the lessons of the Cold War without repeating it. McFaul wears three hats explicitly: social scientist, historian, and former policymaker (he served as US ambassador to Moscow under Obama).

For the purposes of this vault, the book is a first-order reference on at least three fronts. Putinism as an export product — with its militant conservatism, cultural war on liberalism, and populist allies in Europe and the Americas — is directly relevant to understanding the resonance of the radical right in Brazil with bolsonarismo. McFaul’s argument that internal democratic erosion is a graver threat than the external challenge echoes the vault’s analysis of the Nova República and the 2018–2022 cycle in Brazil. And the thesis that democracies only win if they work well at home connects with the project on Brazil as a second-generation democracy that has not yet consolidated its institutions.

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“New Cold War?”

The introduction opens by contrasting two historical moods: the democratic triumphalism of 1991 and the anxiety of the present. Michael McFaul begins with the collapse of the Soviet Union, a moment that seemed to validate democracy, capitalism, liberalism, and the American-led international order all at once. He presents that year not as an abstract turning point but as a lived political atmosphere in which it genuinely appeared that the world was moving toward democratic convergence. The emotional force of the introduction comes from that contrast: what once looked like a settled victory for democracy now appears, in retrospect, like the beginning of a far more unstable era.

McFaul then anchors the story in personal experience. As a young scholar in Moscow working on his dissertation and also helping the National Democratic Institute, he witnessed the failed August 1991 coup and the rise of Boris Yeltsin’s democratic coalition firsthand. In those days, the new Russian leadership seemed to want integration with the West, and American democracy promoters were not treated as hostile agents but as welcome partners. By returning to that experience, McFaul establishes the scale of the reversal he wants to explain: the same Russia that once appeared to be entering the liberal order later shut down the institutions that had symbolized that opening, while China moved in a similarly hostile direction toward democracy-promotion efforts.

From that personal and historical starting point, McFaul states the book’s central diagnosis: great-power competition has returned, and it now pits the United States against two powerful autocracies, China and Russia. This rivalry is not only about military or economic power. It is also ideological. Beijing and Moscow have both become more authoritarian at home while acting abroad in ways that weaken democratic norms and strengthen autocratic actors. Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 becomes, in McFaul’s telling, a decisive marker of this new age: a direct and violent clash in the broader struggle between democratic and autocratic systems.

At the same time, the danger does not come only from the outward rise of authoritarian powers. McFaul argues that democracy itself has entered a prolonged recession, including inside the United States. The optimism that followed the Cold War has given way to polarization, declining faith in democratic institutions, and an alarming erosion of democratic consensus. January 6 is treated as a domestic symptom of this wider decay, not as an isolated event. McFaul also sees Donald Trump’s return to power as deepening the problem, especially insofar as Trump normalizes hostility to constitutional limits and weakens the American commitment to democracy promotion abroad.

This leads to the question posed by the introduction’s title: should this moment be understood as a “new Cold War”? McFaul shows that this language is now everywhere. Analysts, officials, and politicians across administrations have invoked Cold War imagery to describe both China and Russia. He notes that Trump officials used explicitly ideological language about the Chinese Communist Party, that Biden officials framed China as the only competitor capable of mounting a sustained systemic challenge, and that Trump’s second-term team revived even harsher versions of the metaphor. Similar language has long circulated around Russia as well. McFaul’s point is not that the analogy is absurd, but that it has become too easy and too blunt.

The introduction therefore turns from rhetoric to inquiry. McFaul says the book is organized around three major questions. First, how did the world move from post–Cold War confidence in democracy and globalization to a moment defined by autocratic resurgence and doubts about the liberal order? Second, what is the right conceptual framework for understanding the present competition among the United States, China, and Russia? Is this really a replay of the Cold War, or is it a distinct historical configuration that still leaves room for policy choice and strategic agency? Third, what should Americans actually do in response?

To answer those questions, McFaul divides the book into three parts and adopts three different intellectual roles: social scientist, historian, and former policymaker. Part I, he explains, examines the deeper causes of present conflict through the long histories of US relations with Russia and China. His core analytical claim is that three variables interact to produce both cooperation and conflict: power, regime type, and individual leaders. None of these variables is fixed forever, and leaders are especially contingent. That matters because it means the present confrontation is not inevitable. It emerged from a particular alignment of power shifts, autocratic consolidation, and the decisions of specific leaders, and in principle it could be altered by future change.

Part II, which studies the present, is where McFaul places the Cold War analogy under pressure. He argues that there are real similarities between the old Cold War and the current era: renewed ideological competition, rival great powers, and competing visions of world order. But he insists that treating today as a simple replay of the twentieth century distorts more than it clarifies. The current balance of power is not identical to the US-Soviet bipolar structure, and the relationships among economics, ideology, and institutions are far more entangled. His warning is methodological as much as political: bad analogies produce bad strategy.

On the level of power, McFaul argues against two opposite errors. He thinks many Americans long underestimated China and needed to adjust, but he also thinks the correction has gone too far. China is a major challenger and must be contained in important ways, yet it is not the United States’ equal in the aggregate and should not be treated as an existential threat on the model of the Soviet Union. Russia, by contrast, is often underestimated because its economic base is weaker. McFaul argues that this is a serious mistake. Russia remains dangerous not because it matches American power overall, but because Putin is willing to take greater risks, use force aggressively, and exploit instability in ways that can drag the United States and its allies into crisis.

On the ideological level, McFaul sees a genuine contest between democracy and autocracy, but again not a perfect repetition of the Cold War. Xi Jinping is not trying to export Marxism-Leninism through a worldwide revolutionary project in the manner of Stalin, Khrushchev, or Mao. China supports autocracies and promotes norms favorable to authoritarian rule, but its ideological ambition is narrower and more selective. Putin, meanwhile, is more ideologically ambitious than many Western observers admit. McFaul portrays Putinism as a transmissible illiberal model that has found sympathizers in Europe and the United States. The introduction also stresses that the United States itself has traditionally been a strongly ideological actor through democracy promotion, and that Trump represents a sharp break from that century-long pattern.

On the level of world order, McFaul argues that both China and Russia are revisionist, but in different ways and to different degrees. China seeks to reshape the existing order so that it better serves Chinese interests; it wants more influence inside institutions and has also built alternative multilateral structures outside the American-led system. That makes Beijing a serious challenge, but not a revolutionary one in the Soviet sense. Putin is more radically revisionist: he wants to weaken, and where possible undermine, the liberal international order itself. McFaul then adds a third destabilizing force that did not exist in the same way during the original Cold War: the United States can now also damage that order from within through retrenchment, unilateralism, and growing isolationist sentiment.

The final movement of the introduction explains why the book is not merely diagnostic but prescriptive. In Part III, McFaul intends to offer a long-term American grand strategy for this era. He wants policymakers to avoid the worst Cold War habits—overreach, paranoia, wasteful militarization, and support for brutal dictators—while recovering what actually worked, such as alliance-building, arms control, democratic confidence, and strong multilateral institutions. He writes explicitly as a liberal internationalist, aware that this position is unfashionable in an age of illiberal nationalism, yet convinced that it still serves American interests better than isolationism does.

McFaul closes the introduction by defining the book’s scope. He concentrates on China and Russia because they are the two autocratic great powers capable of shaping international outcomes far beyond their regions, because they increasingly cooperate with each other, and because both see the United States as their principal strategic counterpart. He acknowledges that Europe and India also matter, but treats the democratic world largely as a Western bloc anchored by the United States, while leaving open the possibility that Europe could eventually emerge as a more autonomous pole. The result is an introduction that does three things at once: it narrates a historical reversal, rejects lazy analogies, and frames the entire book as an argument for a hard-headed but still liberal response to the new era of democratic and autocratic rivalry.

Chapter 1 — Cooperation and Conflict with Russia

Chapter 1 argues that the history of US-Russia relations cannot be explained by power alone. Michael McFaul’s core claim is that three variables matter together: the balance of power, regime type, and the choices of individual leaders. He rejects the idea that hostility between Washington and Moscow is permanent or civilizational. Instead, he shows that the relationship has moved repeatedly between cooperation and confrontation as those three variables changed. The chapter is therefore both a history and a framework for understanding why tensions are high now but were not always so.

The first long period, stretching from the eighteenth century into the nineteenth, was defined mostly by cooperation between the young American republic and the Russian Empire. The key reason was asymmetry. Russia was a major imperial power; the United States was still weak and peripheral. Because America lacked the capability to challenge Russia, its leaders behaved pragmatically and sought Russian goodwill rather than ideological confrontation. In that environment, regime difference mattered less than basic strategic convenience.

McFaul shows that this early cooperation was not sentimental. It was transactional, but real. Russian and American leaders managed disputes peacefully, including their territorial questions in the Pacific Northwest. The settlement of these questions through diplomacy rather than war culminated in agreements like the Russo-American Treaty and, more dramatically, the sale of Alaska in 1867. That sale stands in the chapter as a symbol of how manageable the relationship could be when the power gap was wide and ideological ambitions were limited.

The American Civil War offered another revealing example. Lincoln’s administration wanted to prevent Britain and France from helping the Confederacy, and Russian neutrality tilted informally toward the Union. Russian naval visits to American ports signaled sympathy for the North and helped deter European meddling. McFaul stresses that Washington was willing to overlook Russia’s repression elsewhere, including in Poland, because geopolitical needs overrode liberal scruples. Even so, he notes a limited moral parallel: Alexander II emancipated the serfs, and Lincoln freed enslaved Americans, creating a brief sense of normative convergence.

As the United States grew stronger and Russian abuses became more visible, values started to matter more. The issue that crystallized this change was the treatment of Jews in the Russian Empire. Pogroms and discriminatory decrees generated outrage in the United States, especially among new immigrants from Russia who now had political rights and public voice in America. McFaul’s point is not that human rights suddenly determined policy, because they did not. Rather, value conflict became an increasingly important irritant layered onto the strategic relationship, especially as immigration tied American domestic politics more tightly to Russian behavior.

The next great turning point came with the collapse of tsarism. McFaul treats the 1917 February Revolution as evidence that democratic opening can quickly alter American perceptions. Wilson and many American observers welcomed the provisional government and imagined that Russia might finally join the democratic world. That hope was real, but fragile. The Kerensky government inherited war, instability, and institutional weakness, and it did not survive long enough to consolidate a liberal order.

The Bolshevik seizure of power transformed the relationship. McFaul argues that the communist regime change in Russia mattered more than the balance of power at this moment, because Soviet Russia was still weak after war and revolution. Yet the ideological threat was enormous. Lenin’s project challenged not only American foreign policy but the legitimacy of capitalism and liberal democracy themselves. American military intervention in the Russian Civil War, followed by years of diplomatic nonrecognition, reflected how profoundly the new communist regime reshaped bilateral relations.

The one major interruption to this hostility was World War II. Roosevelt restored diplomatic relations in 1933, driven less by sympathy for Stalin than by fear of fascism and Japanese expansion. After Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, the United States and the USSR became indispensable allies. McFaul treats this cooperation as real but contingent. Strategic necessity overrode ideological hatred, yet the underlying incompatibility of systems never disappeared. Even during wartime alliance, distrust remained close to the surface.

After 1945, that submerged conflict returned in full force as the Cold War. McFaul portrays the postwar order as a contest between two rival universal projects: the American-led liberal international order and the Soviet communist bloc. He walks through the expansion of ideological competition from Europe to Asia and the developing world, with Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, détente, and Afghanistan marking different phases of the struggle. The larger point is that the Cold War was not simply a balance-of-power rivalry. It was also a clash of regimes and missions, with both sides trying to export their systems abroad.

The Soviet collapse opened the fourth period: a new era of cooperation built on democratic change in Russia. McFaul treats the Gorbachev and Yeltsin years as the most promising moment in the entire relationship. The USSR abandoned communist ideology, Russia experimented with pluralism, and the United States saw a historic opportunity to integrate a democratic Russia into the Western order. Yet he does not romanticize the decade. Yeltsin’s reforms were uneven, institutions were weak, and the social costs of transition were severe, even as US-Russia ties were unusually close.

The fifth period begins with Putin and returns the relationship to confrontation. McFaul emphasizes that this was not caused by one thing alone. Russia regained some power, Putin rebuilt autocracy, and leaders on both sides made consequential choices. Early cooperation after 9/11 and the Obama-Medvedev reset showed that tactical improvement was still possible, but Putin’s return to the presidency, the 2014 invasion of Ukraine, election interference in the United States, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and brutal repression at home drove relations to their worst point in decades. The chapter ends by reaffirming its main thesis: US-Russia hostility is not timeless, but as long as Russia is both revisionist abroad and autocratic at home, confrontation is the most likely outcome.

Chapter 2 — Working with and Against China

Chapter 2 applies the same three-part framework to US-China relations: power, regimes, and leaders. McFaul rejects the fashionable idea that conflict between the United States and China is inevitable because of ancient culture or some fixed “clash of civilizations.” In his telling, the relationship has repeatedly changed direction. Cooperation was possible under some combinations of relative power and leadership, while confrontation emerged under others. This chapter is therefore meant to historicize the current rivalry and to show that it is contingent rather than fated.

In the earliest period, the pattern resembled early US-Russia relations. The United States was weak, China was still a major civilizational and economic center, and the power gap encouraged caution. American leaders sought commerce, not confrontation. Trade became the first durable link between the two societies, and missionaries soon followed merchants. McFaul underscores that democracy in the United States did not initially threaten Qing rulers because the American republic was distant, weak, and not yet missionary in geopolitical terms.

That stability eroded during what Chinese history remembers as the century of humiliation. As Qing power declined and Western, Japanese, and eventually American power rose, foreign coercion intensified. McFaul explains the opium wars, the unequal treaties, and the loss of territory and sovereignty as the structural background to modern Chinese nationalism. The United States tried to distinguish itself from the European empires through the open-door policy, presenting itself as a defender of China’s territorial integrity and equal commercial access. But McFaul is careful not to let Washington off the hook: the policy also served American self-interest and sat uneasily beside US imperial behavior elsewhere.

Societal connections deepened this entanglement. Missionaries, educators, and reformers exported Christianity, science, medicine, and Western values into China. Some Chinese reformers and revolutionaries were influenced by these exchanges, and American-supported educational institutions became important channels of influence. At the same time, those encounters produced backlash. The Taiping Rebellion revealed how imported ideas could destabilize China, while anti-Chinese racism in the United States exposed the limits of American universalism. Chinese labor helped build the American economy, yet Chinese migrants faced exclusion and discrimination.

The Boxer Rebellion marked the point at which foreign penetration provoked open nationalist violence. The United States joined the international coalition that crushed the Boxers and imposed humiliating terms on China. McFaul treats this episode as crucial because it helped embed a lasting Chinese memory of weakness, intervention, and insult. Even if the US was less rapacious than some imperial powers, it still participated in the machinery of coercion. That historical memory later became part of the emotional and ideological fuel of Communist Party rule.

The collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911 created a brief opening that McFaul reads as analogous to Russia’s democratic interlude in 1917, though much longer and messier. The new Republic of China, Sun Yat-sen’s prestige, early elections, a livelier press, and the spread of civil associations all suggested that a more pluralist China might be emerging. American hopes rose accordingly. But unlike Russia’s short revolutionary cycle, China’s post-imperial interregnum dragged on for decades, with warlords, weak institutions, the Kuomintang, the Communists, and Japan all battling for control.

Geopolitics soon displaced democratic optimism. Japanese imperial expansion pushed the United States and Nationalist China into closer alignment, especially during World War II. McFaul shows that realpolitik dominated this period. Washington backed Chiang Kai-shek because Japan was the overriding threat, even as some American officials were impressed by Mao’s forces and hedged their bets. Roosevelt imagined China as one of the great powers in the postwar order, but that ambition depended on Nationalist consolidation, which never came. The failed Marshall mission and the resumption of civil war led directly to Communist victory in 1949.

Mao’s triumph created the third period: confrontation. Here again, McFaul argues that regime change mattered more than raw power. The new People’s Republic was not yet a peer competitor, but it was ideologically revolutionary and soon aligned with Stalin. The Korean War, the defense of Taiwan, the Tibet question, Chinese support for North Vietnam, and anti-communist hysteria in the United States turned bilateral relations openly hostile. For roughly two decades, the United States and Communist China stood on opposite sides of the global ideological divide.

The fourth period began not with democratization but with realpolitik. The Sino-Soviet split created room for a dramatic strategic realignment, and leaders were decisive in seizing it. McFaul gives Nixon, Kissinger, Mao, and Zhou Enlai starring roles in this reversal. The opening to China was not founded on shared values; it was founded on a shared fear of Soviet power. Nixon’s trip to China, the abandonment of Taiwan’s UN seat, and the gradual normalization of relations were among the most striking diplomatic reorientations of the twentieth century.

The relationship deepened even further after Mao’s death, when Deng Xiaoping chose market reform and opening to the world. McFaul argues that Deng’s decisions mattered enormously. China did not democratize, but it did integrate into the capitalist global economy and the American-led order. Diplomatic normalization in 1979, scientific exchanges, rising trade, intelligence cooperation against the Soviet Union, and China’s entry into institutions like the World Bank and IMF all broadened the partnership. In this period, cooperation was sustained by complementary interests and by the belief in Washington that economic opening might eventually produce political liberalization.

McFaul traces how that bet survived repeated shocks. The Reagan and George H. W. Bush years kept engagement on track. Tiananmen in 1989 created a moral and political rupture, but not a strategic break. Clinton ultimately delinked trade from human rights and supported China’s accession to the WTO, deepening economic interdependence. Even under Obama, despite growing tensions over cyber issues, the South China Sea, and human rights, the two governments still cooperated on major multilateral priorities like climate change, the Iran nuclear deal, and aspects of North Korea policy.

The fifth period is the current return to confrontation. McFaul attributes it to the cumulative effect of China’s rise, Xi Jinping’s authoritarian turn, and harder American choices, first under Trump and then under Biden. Xi used China’s new wealth to tighten domestic repression and pursue a more assertive foreign policy. Trump reframed China as the central strategic rival, launched trade and technology conflicts, amplified tensions around Taiwan, and presided over an especially poisonous deterioration during the COVID-19 pandemic. Biden largely preserved the hawkish consensus. The chapter ends with a sober conclusion: current US-China confrontation is very deep, but it is the product of historically specific changes in power, regime behavior, and leadership, not an eternal law of history.

Chapter 3 — The End of American Hegemony

Chapter 3 shifts from bilateral history to the broader international system. McFaul begins with a blunt proposition: the post-Cold War moment was the high-water mark of American power, and that moment is over. In the 1990s the United States looked like an uncontested superpower militarily, economically, institutionally, and culturally. The world appeared unipolar, and even rivals accepted American primacy. McFaul does not say the United States has ceased to be the strongest country. His point is narrower and sharper: American hegemony has ended, and foreign policy must start from that reality.

Before making that case, he pauses to define power. Drawing on Joseph Nye, he treats power as the ability to get others to do what they otherwise would not do. But he also emphasizes how hard it is to measure. Military inventories are only proxies. Outcomes matter, and outcomes often defy expectations. McFaul uses examples like the overestimation of Soviet strength, the underestimation of Russia’s recovery, the overestimation of Russia before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and the mismatch between America’s huge military superiority and its eventual failure in Afghanistan. The lesson is that power is multidimensional and cannot be reduced to simple arithmetic.

That multidimensional view includes coercion, inducement, credibility, and intention. A country may possess great resources and still fail if it cannot convert them into outcomes. A weaker country may punch above its weight if its leaders are more willing to take risks. McFaul therefore insists that judgments about power must include not only military hardware and GDP, but also diplomatic leverage, domestic resilience, innovation capacity, institutional cohesion, and leadership intent. This setup prepares the ground for his larger claim that America’s relative decline is partly self-inflicted.

He identifies the 1991 Gulf War as the symbolic peak of American military and diplomatic power. The United States not only defeated Iraq rapidly; it did so with broad international backing and UN legitimacy. In McFaul’s reading, this was American primacy at its cleanest: overwhelming capabilities combined with coalition-building skill and a strong defense of international norms against annexation. The war showed not just hard power but persuasive power. It is the benchmark against which later American choices look less effective and less legitimate.

Soon after that peak, however, Washington began reducing military power. McFaul walks through the post-Cold War drawdown in nuclear arsenals, force structure, procurement, and defense spending. These cuts were not irrational; they reflected a world in which the Soviet threat had collapsed. But they still mattered. The United States preserved major military advantages, yet rivals were given space to narrow the gap, especially in areas where long-term acquisition and industrial capacity mattered. The chapter’s logic is not that disarmament was foolish in itself, but that post-Cold War optimism encouraged a complacency that later proved costly.

The more serious damage came from how American power was used after 9/11. McFaul draws an important distinction between wars of necessity and wars of choice. Afghanistan began with broad legitimacy, allied support, and a direct connection to the attacks of September 11. But the mission expanded into occupation, democratic transformation, and state-building on a massive scale. The result was staggering cost in lives and money, followed by strategic failure when the Taliban returned to power. For McFaul, that outcome badly weakened both American hard power and confidence in America’s ability to remake other societies.

Iraq did even more damage. McFaul treats the 2003 invasion as a war of choice that undercut US credibility because the stated rationale about weapons of mass destruction proved wrong and the intervention lacked the broad legitimacy that had existed in 1991 and 2001. The war toppled Saddam quickly but produced insurgency, militia violence, immense civilian suffering, and a long occupation with disappointing political results. Just as important, it handed America’s adversaries a durable rhetorical weapon. From that point forward, denunciations of Russian or other violations of international law could be met with a simple counterpunch: what about Iraq?

He extends this argument to Libya and the wider Middle East. Even where interventions began with narrower aims or stronger legitimacy, they often generated disorder, mission creep, or long shadows of instability. The cumulative effect, in his account, was strategic distraction. While Washington spent blood, money, and political attention on counterterrorism and Middle Eastern wars, China and Russia faced less concentrated American attention. The United States also redirected vast portions of its engagement with developing countries toward security assistance, leaving China better positioned to build influence through infrastructure and economic statecraft.

McFaul then turns to economics. In the 1990s, American primacy rested not only on military power but on the prestige of the US-led economic model. Over time, that edge narrowed. Part of the reason, he argues, is that American policy helped both Russia and especially China grow richer without successfully encouraging democratization. Support for China’s integration into the global economy, including WTO entry, strengthened a future rival. The 2008 financial crisis then damaged both American output and the reputation of American capitalism. It made the Chinese state-led model look, to many observers, more competent than the liberal model Washington had spent decades promoting.

The COVID-19 era and Trump’s second term deepen this economic concern. McFaul notes that the pandemic exposed dangerous American dependencies on Chinese supply chains and revealed serious weaknesses in domestic governance. Yet he also argues that radical tariff policies and cuts to research and development under Trump 2.0 threaten to damage the foundations of long-run American strength even more directly. In his view, a country can lose relative power not only because rivals rise, but because it undermines its own innovation base, global economic role, and institutional reliability.

The chapter’s final move is domestic and political. McFaul argues that hegemony has weakened not just because of material shifts, but because Americans themselves are less willing to bear the burdens of global leadership. The old bipartisan consensus around free trade, alliance leadership, democracy promotion, and international engagement has eroded. Forever wars helped produce this mood, but Trump made it explicit through “America First,” hostility toward multilateral institutions, skepticism toward allies, and retreat from international commitments. Isolationist sentiment now has deep roots in American public opinion.

Polarization compounds the problem. McFaul points to January 6, democratic erosion at home, and widening partisan division as factors that weaken America’s soft power and its capacity to act coherently abroad. His conclusion is not fatalistic. The United States still has extraordinary capabilities and remains stronger than either Russia or China taken individually. But the era in which American supremacy was so overwhelming that it could structure the entire system almost by itself is gone. The practical challenge now is to rebuild power wisely, use it with more discipline, and adapt strategy to a world in which the margin of American dominance is much thinner.

Chapter 4 — Russian vs. American Power

The chapter opens by challenging the once-common Western assumption that post-Soviet Russia had permanently ceased to be a great power. Michael McFaul recalls the disorder of Russia in the 1990s and argues that, even amid collapse, the country still possessed the raw ingredients of renewal: educated people, vast natural resources, oil and gas, and above all a nuclear arsenal. In his view, the real question after 1991 was never whether Russia would matter again, but whether it would reemerge as a democracy integrated into the Western order or revert to authoritarian rule. The tragedy, as he frames it, is that Russia did recover as a power, but under an increasingly autocratic and revisionist regime.

McFaul’s core claim is that Russia is weaker than both the United States and China, yet still dangerous enough to disrupt the international system and directly threaten American interests. He insists that Russia should not be mistaken for one of the two global poles in an emerging bipolar system, because that role belongs to the United States and China. Even so, Russia remains a consequential power in military, cyber, intelligence, and ideological terms. What makes today’s Russia especially threatening is not just its capabilities, but the combination of those capabilities with Putin’s willingness to use them aggressively.

He identifies three features that make contemporary Russia particularly alarming. First, unlike during most of the Cold War, Russia now works in close alignment with China, which means Washington must deal with two anti-Western great powers that reinforce one another. Second, Putin has proved more willing than many Soviet leaders to intervene recklessly in other countries: Georgia in 2008, Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014, Syria in 2015, American elections in 2016, and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Third, Putin is not simply pursuing narrow security goals. McFaul presents him as an ideological revisionist who wants to reshape both Europe and the wider global order.

The military section begins with a caution: measuring military power is harder than counting tanks, troops, or budgets. Morale, training, doctrine, geography, and technological adaptation matter, and the war in Ukraine has exposed how misleading aggregate rankings can be. McFaul’s bottom line is that the United States remains stronger than Russia across most military dimensions, but the gap is narrower than many Americans assume, especially in the European theater. Russia may not be globally dominant, yet it retains enough power to menace NATO’s eastern flank and force Washington to take its military threat seriously.

On nuclear weapons, the chapter stresses rough parity. Despite decades of arms-control progress, Russia and the United States still possess the overwhelming majority of the world’s nuclear warheads, and both retain the capacity for civilization-ending destruction. McFaul treats New START as a real achievement that reduced deployed arsenals, but he also shows how fragile that achievement has become. Arms control has eroded, inspections have been suspended, and the larger atmosphere of restraint that once governed the relationship is breaking down.

He places special emphasis on Russia’s modernization of nuclear delivery systems and on Putin’s rhetoric around nuclear use. The Kremlin has developed or advertised a series of new systems, including hypersonic and novel delivery platforms, some of which may be less impressive in practice than in propaganda. Even so, McFaul argues that their existence makes deterrence less stable rather than more stable. More disturbing still is Putin’s repeated willingness to threaten battlefield nuclear use during the Ukraine war, something McFaul sees as more explicit and reckless than the nuclear signaling of the late Cold War.

The chapter’s discussion of conventional military power is more nuanced than a simple claim of Russian weakness. McFaul shows how Russia’s forces deteriorated badly in the 1990s, then recovered under Putin through reforms, rearmament, professionalization, and increased spending. That modernization produced visible successes in Crimea and Syria and helped convince Putin that Ukraine could be subdued quickly in 2022. Ukraine proved him wrong, but the war also demonstrated that Russia could absorb losses, mobilize industry, adapt militarily, and continue fighting at scale.

Still, McFaul concludes that the United States retains major qualitative advantages in conventional power. American aircraft, submarines, naval assets, training, and military professionalism remain superior. Russia retains strengths in missiles, drones, artillery, and some submarine capabilities, but its army has suffered huge losses, its navy has been embarrassed by a much weaker maritime opponent, and its demographic decline limits the sustainability of long wars. The chapter repeatedly returns to the same judgment: Russia is not stronger than the United States, but it is dangerous enough where it matters geographically to create real risk.

McFaul then turns to other domains where Russia punches above its economic weight. Private military companies, especially Wagner and its successor structures, gave Moscow flexible instruments for intervention in Africa and the Middle East while preserving plausible deniability. In space, Russia lags far behind the United States in scale but still fields meaningful anti-satellite and missile-warning capabilities. In cyber and intelligence, Russia remains formidable, especially because Putin has shown a greater readiness than American leaders to authorize disruptive and malicious operations. Yet on alliances, the asymmetry is stark: the United States has NATO and a broad network of allies, while Russia has little comparable support beyond narrower, more transactional partnerships.

The final part of the chapter examines the economic foundations of Russian power and the constraints on its future. McFaul argues that Russia is far more economically resilient than caricatures suggest, but it is still vastly smaller and poorer than the United States. Its dependence on energy, growing state control, corruption, demographic decline, weak financial reach, brain drain, and technological stagnation all limit long-term strength. Even so, Russia does not need to equal the United States to be a serious threat. McFaul’s conclusion is that Putin’s Russia remains a real geopolitical danger because it is willing to use force for revisionist ends, and because its partnership with China makes the strategic environment more dangerous than in the final decades of the Cold War.

Chapter 5 — Chinese vs. American Power

McFaul begins this chapter with a vivid paradox: arriving in Beijing can feel like stepping into the future, yet much of China remains poor, rural, and structurally underdeveloped. He uses this contrast to frame the entire chapter. China is unquestionably a great power and the central long-term challenge to the United States, but it is also a country of deep contradictions. The gleaming high-speed rail, digital payments, and advanced infrastructure visible in major cities coexist with hundreds of millions of rural citizens whose educational and health outcomes remain far below what a true high-income superpower would require.

A second contradiction lies at the heart of McFaul’s political analysis. China has achieved extraordinary economic development without democratizing, which appears to challenge modernization theory. Yet he remains skeptical that this model is indefinitely sustainable. In his view, a system not constrained by rule of law, property rights, and accountable institutions can produce growth for long stretches, but it can also become predatory, arbitrary, and self-defeating. That is why he warns against two opposite errors at once: complacency about China’s rise and fatalism about China’s eventual dominance.

McFaul argues that US-China competition resembles the Cold War in some ways but differs from it in crucial respects. Like the US-Soviet contest, it is a rivalry between two superpowers with opposing regime types and global ambitions. But China is a far greater economic challenge than the Soviet Union ever was, and the two economies are deeply intertwined rather than largely separated. He uses the image of a long-distance race to make the point: China has closed the gap dramatically, but it has not yet passed the United States, and it is not guaranteed to do so.

On military power, McFaul’s headline judgment is that the United States still retains the global advantage. It spends more, fields higher-quality weapons systems, possesses more experienced forces, and benefits from an enormous alliance structure. However, he also insists that the most relevant military balance is not the global aggregate but the regional balance in Asia, especially around Taiwan and the South China Sea. There, geography works in China’s favor, and that local balance is moving toward a dangerous form of parity.

The nuclear section emphasizes that the United States still enjoys a substantial lead over China in warheads, deployed readiness, and delivery systems. China’s nuclear arsenal remains much smaller, but it is expanding rapidly, which McFaul treats as strategically significant even before parity is reached. The broader point is not that China already matches the United States in nuclear power, but that Beijing is investing to make deterrence more credible and to narrow American advantages over time. In a rivalry this serious, even partial narrowing matters.

In conventional military terms, McFaul paints a mixed but worrying picture. China has major advantages in manpower, shipbuilding capacity, missile production, and the sheer concentration of forces in its home region. Its navy is growing quickly, its anti-access and area-denial systems are designed specifically to make American power projection harder, and its long-range missiles directly threaten the foundations of US naval strategy in Asia. At the same time, the United States still holds important quality advantages in airpower, submarines, training, command flexibility, and missile defense. The resulting picture is not Chinese superiority, but a narrowing regional balance that invites miscalculation.

McFaul extends this analysis into space, cyber, and intelligence. The United States remains ahead overall, especially because of its broader technological ecosystem and institutional experience. Yet China is no longer a marginal player in any of these domains. It is building a major space program, developing anti-satellite capabilities, penetrating American systems through cyber operations, and investing heavily in espionage, industrial theft, and strategic surveillance. In some areas, especially human intelligence and internal data control, McFaul suggests China enjoys advantages that democracies cannot easily replicate.

Alliances are where the strategic contrast becomes most lopsided. The United States can combine its power with NATO in Europe and treaty allies across Asia, while China has almost no formal alliance network of comparable value. North Korea is Beijing’s only treaty ally, and even that relationship is more burden than multiplier. China has important partnerships with Russia and Pakistan, but these do not remotely equal the military and political advantages Washington derives from allies such as Japan, Australia, South Korea, and the broader democratic camp.

Economically, McFaul argues that China is the most formidable competitor the United States has ever faced. He distinguishes between nominal GDP, where the United States remains ahead, and purchasing-power terms, where China may already be larger. He also emphasizes that China’s rise has transformed world trade in ways the Soviet Union never did, giving Beijing tools of economic coercion that Moscow largely lacked. But he refuses the idea of an unstoppable Chinese ascent. Growth has slowed sharply, GDP per capita remains far below American levels, the dollar still dominates global finance, and China’s development model faces mounting strains.

Those strains form the chapter’s concluding warning. Demographic decline, low immigration, the rural-urban education gap, inequality, and Xi Jinping’s own crackdowns on private enterprise all threaten China’s long-term trajectory. McFaul also treats science and technology as a genuinely contested arena: the United States still leads in university quality, private investment, high-value firms, and many advanced capabilities, but China is catching up in research output, patents, manufacturing scale, AI, and strategic technologies such as quantum. His conclusion is deliberately balanced. China is neither ten feet tall nor a paper tiger. It is an extraordinary challenger whose power is real, whose weaknesses are also real, and whose rise forces the United States to find a sustainable equilibrium between engagement and containment.

Chapter 6 — The Waning of Democracy as a Universal Value

This chapter begins from the optimism of the early post-Cold War era. After 1989 and 1991, democracy seemed to stand alone as the legitimate model of political development. Communist regimes in Europe collapsed, apartheid gave way to democracy in South Africa, and even many autocrats felt compelled to speak in democratic language rather than openly defend dictatorship. McFaul reminds the reader that, in that moment, democracy appeared not merely strong but normatively triumphant.

He writes this chapter partly as a witness to that optimism. Having worked on democracy promotion in the Soviet Union and in newly independent Russia, he recalls a moment when building democracy looked like a technical challenge rather than a contested ideological project. The assumption was that liberal democracy represented the destination, and the remaining work involved institutions, elections, parties, media, and civil society. The chapter’s purpose is to explain why that confidence dissolved.

McFaul’s first analytical move is to insist that democracy and autocracy are not just institutional arrangements; they are also associated with ideas and ideological claims. He acknowledges that some people resist calling democracy an ideology, but he argues that this is too narrow. Liberal democracy carries a set of moral principles, legitimating beliefs, and assumptions about how politics should be ordered. If liberalism is an ideology, then illiberalism and the various doctrines that justify dictatorship must be treated the same way.

This matters because McFaul rejects the idea that power alone explains great-power competition. Material capabilities are essential, but regime type and political ideas also shape international behavior. Democracies generally cooperate more easily with one another, autocracies often fear democratic examples near their borders, and great powers try to project not only power but legitimacy. In that sense, the ideological struggle between democrats and autocrats did not disappear with the Soviet Union; it merely changed form.

The chapter then argues that democracy’s loss of prestige stems partly from American overreach. In the 1990s, the United States expanded democracy-promotion institutions, funded civil society abroad, treated NATO enlargement as a democratizing tool, and often linked democracy promotion to the liberal international order. Under Clinton, this project benefited from unprecedented American primacy. The problem, McFaul argues, was that the democracy mission later became entangled with military interventions whose legitimacy and outcomes damaged the cause they were supposed to advance.

Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and especially Iraq are central to this argument. Both interventions toppled dictatorships, but they also fostered the view that democracy promotion had become a cover for unilateral military action and regime change. The failure to build stable democracies in those countries severely damaged the credibility of American idealism. Obama tried to reset the strategy by emphasizing multilateralism, rule of law, and gradual change rather than armed democratization, but Libya and the broader disappointments of the Arab Spring further weakened confidence that the United States could effectively advance democratic outcomes abroad.

McFaul treats Trump as a turning point of a different sort. In his first term, Trump showed unusual deference to autocrats and little interest in democracy promotion as a foreign-policy mission. Biden attempted to revive that tradition, rhetorically and institutionally, but with mixed results and far less public support than earlier presidents had enjoyed. Trump’s return to office, in the book’s timeline, sharpens the crisis because it suggests not just fatigue with democracy promotion but open hostility to it from within the American presidency.

The domestic dimension is equally important. McFaul argues that the erosion of American democracy has become one of the chief reasons democracy has lost prestige internationally. January 6, voter suppression battles, the expansion of executive power, and the broader decay of trust in democratic institutions have all weakened the United States as a model. Even if he remains cautiously hopeful that American democracy will survive, he is clear that the country’s internal deterioration has reduced its ability to persuade others that liberal democracy is both effective and desirable.

He then surveys the instruments through which the United States has projected democratic ideas: party-to-party ties, nongovernmental organizations, international broadcasting, economic assistance, academic exchanges, sanctions, and, more controversially, military intervention. The picture is mixed. Some of these tools, especially universities, media, civil society support, and selective sanctions, still provide real influence. Others have produced disappointment, backlash, or strategic overreach. And in the second Trump administration described by the book, many of these instruments are being weakened or dismantled.

The chapter closes on a qualified but unmistakable note of hope. McFaul accepts that democracy is in global recession and that American efforts have often failed or backfired. Yet he also argues that autocracy has not become a genuinely universal aspiration. People still mobilize against dictatorships far more often than they mobilize in favor of them, democratic uprisings continue to erupt, and public opinion still tends to prefer democracy over its alternatives even in periods of frustration. His final claim is that the struggle between autocrats and democrats is now both international and domestic. The United States remains a democracy, but the larger contest no longer runs simply between countries; it also runs within them.

Chapter 7 — Exporting Putinism

1. Michael McFaul opens the chapter with a personal scene that doubles as an argument. When he arrived in Moscow in January 2012 to serve as US ambassador, Russian state television immediately portrayed him as an American specialist in revolution sent to overthrow Vladimir Putin. At first McFaul assumed this was cynical campaign theater linked to Putin’s return to the presidency. Over time, however, he came to think that Putin and his circle were not merely pretending to believe in Western plots. They genuinely saw democratic protest, civil society activism, and post-Soviet “color revolutions” as instruments of regime change directed from abroad. That conviction, McFaul argues, is essential to understanding the ideological dimension of US-Russia conflict.

2. From there, the chapter makes a broader claim: relations between Washington and Moscow cannot be explained by power politics alone. As Russia became more authoritarian under Putin, ideological tension with the United States intensified. McFaul argues that this is not accidental. Putinism is not just a method for staying in office; it is a worldview that opposes liberal democracy, pluralism, and the moral assumptions of the modern West. Unlike Soviet communism, Putinism does not aspire to universal emancipation or a coherent theory of history. Its appeal is narrower and more cynical. But it still travels internationally because it speaks to leaders and movements that distrust liberal institutions, resent cosmopolitan elites, and crave a more hierarchical social order.

3. McFaul defines the core of Putinism as a blend of nationalism, conservative orthodoxy, civilizational rhetoric, and hostility to liberal democracy. Putin presents Russia as the defender of tradition against a decadent West allegedly corrupted by secularism, multiculturalism, feminism, LGBTQ rights, and elite liberal moralism. In this account, Russia is not simply a country defending its interests; it is a civilization defending normality itself. That framing gives Putinism resonance among nationalist and populist forces abroad. McFaul’s point is that the Kremlin is not selling a full political system with mass global appeal. It is selling a moral and political attitude: anti-liberal, anti-progressive, anti-universalist, and obsessed with order, identity, and grievance.

4. Another pillar of Putinism is the cult of the strong state. McFaul shows how Putin preserved the outer shell of elections, parties, parliament, and courts while emptying them of real competition. The message exported abroad is that democracy is disorder, weakness, and manipulation, whereas concentrated executive power is realism. Putin’s model promises stability through centralized authority, national unity, and the taming of independent institutions. This model is attractive not because it is intellectually rich, but because it flatters ruling elites who want the legitimacy of popular sovereignty without the risk of actual alternation in power. It also appeals to foreign admirers who see liberal checks and balances as obstacles rather than safeguards.

5. McFaul then turns to sovereignty, a word Putin uses constantly but selectively. The Kremlin frames itself as the defender of sovereign states against American hegemony, democracy promotion, and foreign interference. Yet this language often functions as cover for solidarity among autocrats. Putin denounces outside support for democratic movements in places like Ukraine, Georgia, or elsewhere in the post-Soviet space as illegitimate intervention, while backing dictators who suppress their own societies. Sovereignty in Putin’s usage does not mean consistent respect for borders or self-determination. It means protection for authoritarian rulers from liberal pressure. This is why the defense of sovereignty becomes one of the central exportable elements of Putinism.

6. The chapter also emphasizes a less obvious objective: the destruction of truth as a shared standard. McFaul argues that Russian disinformation often does not aim to persuade people of one clear alternative story. Its purpose is more corrosive. By flooding the information environment with contradiction, conspiracy, cynicism, and strategic lies, Kremlin operators seek to convince audiences that nothing is knowable, everyone is hypocritical, and facts are merely weapons. That epistemic sabotage weakens democratic life because democracies depend on citizens being able to distinguish evidence from fabrication well enough to argue in public. Putinism therefore exports not only messages, but also a style of politics built on nihilism and permanent suspicion.

7. McFaul next catalogs the instruments Russia uses to spread this ideology. Personal diplomacy is one of the most important. Putin has cultivated ties with leaders and movements that share his hostility to liberalism, especially in Europe but also in the United States and the post-Soviet world. McFaul highlights relationships with figures such as Viktor Orbán, Marine Le Pen, Matteo Salvini, and other nationalist or illiberal actors. Party-to-party networks matter too, even if United Russia is weaker than the Soviet Communist Party once was. So do church-linked and NGO-style ties, diaspora networks, conservative gatherings, and purported civil society channels that in practice function as extensions of state power.

8. Propaganda and covert influence operations occupy a central place in the chapter. McFaul describes Russian state media, troll farms, social platforms, cyber theft, and doxing as parts of a single ecosystem. The best-known example is the 2016 US presidential election, when Russian intelligence hacked and released stolen material while propaganda outlets and online influence networks amplified divisions inside American society. McFaul is careful to frame these tools not as omnipotent, but as strategically effective because they target real fractures that already exist. Russia does not need to invent every grievance. It needs only to intensify distrust, radicalize factions, and reward voices already aligned with the Kremlin’s anti-liberal narrative.

9. Economic leverage and military force make Putinism more dangerous than a mere media campaign. Russia has fewer material resources than either the United States or China, but it has used energy dependence, corruption, elite co-optation, arms sales, private mercenaries, and direct military intervention to sustain friendly regimes and weaken adversaries. McFaul points to Syria as a decisive example: Russian intervention prolonged Bashar al-Assad’s rule and signaled that Moscow would use violence to defend autocracy. The Wagner network in Africa and elsewhere shows the same logic in another form. Putinism is therefore exported not only through ideas and narratives, but through coercion in support of rulers who share Moscow’s interests and methods.

10. McFaul’s final judgment is that Putinism has real but bounded impact. It has helped some autocrats survive, encouraged illiberal movements in democracies, and made Russia a reference point for politicians who admire nationalism without liberal restraint. At the same time, Russia’s global image remains broadly negative, and Putinism does not command the expansive aspirational appeal that communism once did. Its success comes less from inspiring masses than from poisoning democratic systems, validating authoritarian rulers, and normalizing the belief that freedom is chaos. For McFaul, this ideological project is not peripheral to Russian foreign policy. It is one of the main reasons conflict with the democratic world persists as long as Putin remains in power.

Chapter 8 — Exporting Xi Jinping Thought

1. McFaul begins chapter 8 with an encounter in Beijing in 2024, where Chinese interlocutors insisted that better US-China relations required “mutual respect.” When he pressed them on the meaning of the phrase, the answer was unmistakable: Americans were expected to respect the legitimacy of one-party Communist rule and stop treating liberal democracy as a universal norm. That exchange leads to the chapter’s central argument. The conflict between the United States and China is not purely about trade, technology, or military balance. It is also ideological. China’s autocratic system and America’s democratic system can coexist, but each implicitly challenges the other, especially now that China is rich, powerful, and governed by a leader who has made ideology central again.

2. McFaul identifies several reasons why ideological tension with China has sharpened under Xi. First, China is vastly stronger than it was in earlier decades, so its model now looks consequential rather than marginal. Second, China’s economic success gives credibility to the claim that modernization does not require democratization. Third, Xi himself talks far more openly than his immediate predecessors about Marxism-Leninism, party leadership, socialism, and ideological discipline. He is not simply a technocratic manager. Fourth, Xi is deeply fearful that democratic ideas in Hong Kong, Taiwan, or mainland China could trigger a color revolution against the Communist Party. Finally, American leaders, especially beginning in the Trump era, increasingly chose to frame rivalry with China in ideological terms as well.

3. The first exportable component of Xi Jinping Thought is the Chinese model of development. McFaul presents it as a hybrid formula rather than a strict command economy: markets operate, private capital exists, and globalization is embraced, but the Communist Party remains supreme, strategic sectors stay under political guidance, and long-term planning is centralized. This combination is attractive to many developing-country elites because it appears to promise growth, state capacity, infrastructure, and technological modernization without the instability, contestation, and accountability pressures associated with liberal democracy. The message is not that countries must copy every Chinese institution. It is that they can become prosperous while keeping politics tightly controlled.

4. A second major theme is sovereignty. Like Putin, Xi uses the language of noninterference and respect for domestic systems to shield autocracy from outside criticism. Chinese leaders treat foreign condemnation of repression in Xinjiang, pressure on Hong Kong, or support for democratic Taiwan as proof that the West uses universal values as a pretext for weakening rivals. McFaul argues that this sovereignty doctrine is not neutral. In practice it defends authoritarian rule and delegitimizes democracy promotion. It also helps Beijing present itself as a reliable partner to governments that fear Western scrutiny of corruption, human rights abuses, or electoral manipulation. In that sense, China’s defense of sovereignty is another form of ideological export.

5. Xi also promotes Chinese values and a positive image of China as a civilizational alternative to the West. McFaul notes the emphasis on harmony, hierarchy, discipline, social order, collective purpose, and cultural continuity. Under Xi, these themes are fused with the language of national rejuvenation and anti-Western critique. Chinese thinkers close to the regime sometimes present Confucian or broadly traditional ideas as morally superior to liberal individualism. Even so, McFaul draws an important distinction: he finds weaker evidence that Xi is trying to export orthodox communism in the old revolutionary sense. The chapter pushes back against exaggerated American claims that Beijing is organizing a worldwide communist uprising. Xi is promoting authoritarian legitimacy and Chinese influence more than a universal proletarian doctrine.

6. The tools China uses are extensive and highly organized. Personal diplomacy matters because Xi meets frequently with foreign leaders and often uses those meetings to emphasize ideological themes, especially with rulers who value distance from Washington or want validation for their own centralized systems. Party-to-party ties are another important mechanism. The Chinese Communist Party maintains training, exchange, and relationship-building networks with parties and political elites abroad, especially in the developing world. McFaul stresses that these ties can transmit governing techniques as much as slogans: methods of organization, propaganda, digital control, surveillance, and elite management are all part of what foreign partners can learn from Beijing.

7. Unlike the democratic understanding of civil society, many of China’s supposedly nongovernmental channels are state-linked or state-directed. McFaul describes a broad ecosystem that includes united front activity, diaspora outreach, media expansion, and influence operations aimed at shaping what foreign publics see and say about China. Global media outlets, social platforms, and diaspora information spaces can all carry Beijing’s preferred narratives, while sensitive topics such as Xinjiang, Tibet, Taiwan, and Hong Kong are tightly managed. The chapter treats TikTok as especially important because it combines extraordinary reach with content moderation and political pressure concerns. Beijing’s objective is not always to persuade skeptics outright. Often it is to limit criticism, redirect attention, and define what counts as legitimate discussion.

8. Education, research, culture, and entertainment form another layer of Chinese ideological reach. McFaul reviews the role of Confucius Institutes, academic partnerships, fellowships, think-tank cooperation, and cultural programming as instruments for presenting China favorably and creating habits of deference around politically sensitive topics. He also notes that Beijing exploits the openness of liberal societies in ways that are not reciprocated inside China. Lobbying, access to Hollywood, and pressure on universities or corporations allow Chinese officials and aligned actors to shape speech abroad without tolerating equivalent foreign influence at home. That asymmetry is one of McFaul’s recurring concerns: open systems create avenues for influence that closed systems can selectively block.

9. Economic power is the strongest section of the chapter because it is the heart of China’s international appeal. Trade and investment make China indispensable to many countries. The Belt and Road Initiative and associated lending institutions give Beijing tools for building dependence, prestige, and elite relationships at enormous scale. Economic sanctions, market exclusion, and informal coercion let China punish governments or firms that cross political red lines. During the pandemic, vaccine diplomacy became another instrument for projecting competence and generosity. McFaul does not reduce all Chinese economic policy to ideology, but he argues that economic success itself is ideological evidence for Beijing’s claim that autocratic governance can outperform democratic systems.

10. In the end, McFaul judges Chinese ideological export to be formidable but more defensive than Putin’s. Xi is better at protecting existing autocracies, legitimizing state-led development, and improving China’s image in parts of the Global South than at creating a universal movement around communism. China’s reach is amplified by its market size, infrastructure financing, and technological centrality, all of which are more substantial than Russia’s tools. Yet the chapter also underscores China’s limits. Debt concerns, coercive behavior, censorship, and distrust of Beijing constrain its appeal, especially in advanced democracies. Xi Jinping Thought travels not because everyone admires it, but because China has shown that authoritarian modernization can be wealthy, disciplined, and globally influential.

Chapter 9 — The Decline of the Liberal International Order

1. Chapter 9 steps back from Russia and China to examine the system they are challenging. McFaul starts with the extraordinary optimism of the early post-Cold War moment. After the Soviet collapse, the US-led liberal international order had no serious rival. Institutions once confined largely to the democratic West seemed capable of becoming truly global. Russia under Boris Yeltsin wanted to join Western clubs, while China at least sought deeper integration into the world economy. For a brief period, many policymakers believed that the future belonged to a rules-based order anchored in sovereignty, markets, multilateral institutions, and, at least in aspiration, human rights and democracy.

2. Before explaining the decline of that order, McFaul pauses to define what he means by international order at all. He rejects the hard realist view that world politics is nothing but anarchy and raw power. Power matters, of course, but institutions matter too. Rules, treaties, norms, and organizations can alter incentives, lower mistrust, coordinate action, and generate public goods that states acting alone would struggle to produce. He uses a practical analogy: just as traffic rules make life better even for people who disagree about everything else, international rules can make the world safer and more predictable. The United Nations and the broader network of multilateral bodies are therefore not decorative. They shape state behavior, even if imperfectly and unevenly.

3. McFaul’s account of the order at its peak emphasizes how unusual the 1990s felt. The Gulf War authorization in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait symbolized the possibility of real collective security. Market reforms spread across much of the world, democratic transitions multiplied, and international organizations concerned with human rights or economic integration appeared to gain momentum. In Washington, there was genuine belief that Russia could become a democratic stakeholder and that China’s economic opening would eventually produce political liberalization. This was the high point of liberal internationalism: not merely a balance of power favorable to the United States, but a broad expectation that more countries would converge toward the same rules and norms.

4. Yet McFaul is careful not to romanticize that era. Even at the height of confidence, there were contradictions. China joined many economic institutions without embracing the political values associated with the liberal order. Russia’s initial democratic opening proved reversible. And the United States itself did not always behave like a disciplined guardian of international rules. These inconsistencies weakened the order from within. The chapter stresses that legitimacy matters in international politics. If the leading power claims to uphold rules but ignores them when convenient, the moral authority of the system decays. That loss of credibility becomes especially costly when later confronting authoritarian powers that can point to earlier Western violations.

5. The chapter’s middle sections chart the visible symptoms of decline. The UN Security Council is no longer the arena of post-Cold War cooperation that many once hoped for; more often it resembles a renewed great-power stalemate. Economic multilateralism is also fraying. The World Trade Organization is weakened, major powers are decoupling, and enthusiasm for globalization has sharply diminished. International cooperation on democracy and human rights is thinner than it was in the 1990s. McFaul argues that two forces explain most of this deterioration: the rise of powerful states that never fully accepted the liberal order’s political foundations, and the erosion of faith inside the democratic world, especially the United States, in the benefits of sustaining that order.

6. American disillusionment is therefore central to the argument. McFaul notes that presidents from George H. W. Bush through Barack Obama all supported the liberal order rhetorically, but American policy repeatedly damaged the very norms Washington claimed to defend. The 1999 bombing of Serbia without explicit UN Security Council authorization hurt US credibility. The 2003 invasion of Iraq was worse, because it made American talk of international law sound selective and self-serving. Later interventions and long wars, including Afghanistan and Libya, deepened global skepticism about both the competence and the moral consistency of liberal internationalism. These episodes gave Russia, China, and many non-Western critics a durable repertoire of whataboutism.

7. McFaul also links the order’s decline to domestic politics inside the United States. Global leadership became harder to sustain as Americans grew tired of costly wars, skeptical of free trade, angry about inequality, and doubtful that globalization benefited ordinary citizens. The idea that the United States should provide global public goods or act as the world’s stabilizer began to look, to many voters, like a bad bargain. This backlash was not created by Donald Trump, but he captured and intensified it. The deeper point of the chapter is that international order cannot survive when the society that built it no longer believes its burdens are worth carrying.

8. Trump serves as the clearest embodiment of that shift. McFaul presents him as more than a tactical unilateralist. Trump openly rejected the premise that sovereignty should ever be pooled or constrained by multilateral commitments, embraced the language of “America First,” and viewed alliances and institutions in transactional, zero-sum terms. The chapter lists the practical consequences: withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Paris Climate Accord, the Iran nuclear deal, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the Open Skies Treaty, and the World Health Organization, alongside deliberate weakening of the WTO and repeated public uncertainty about NATO commitments. In McFaul’s telling, the order’s principal architect became one of its principal saboteurs.

9. The Biden years, in this account, brought partial repair but not full restoration. Rejoining some agreements, reassuring allies, and defending Ukraine signaled a renewed commitment to multilateralism. But McFaul makes clear that the underlying American consensus has not returned. Support for aiding Ukraine proved contested in Congress and among voters. The withdrawal from Afghanistan showed that the appetite for prolonged international missions had sharply diminished. Even when the United States still acts internationally, it does so in a domestic environment far more suspicious of alliances, trade regimes, and long-term strategic responsibility than during the immediate post-Cold War decades. That means the liberal order remains fragile regardless of who occupies the White House.

10. McFaul’s conclusion is blunt. The liberal international order is declining not simply because Russia and China are revisionist powers, but because the democratic coalition that sustained it has become less confident, less disciplined, and less willing to bear the costs of leadership. External challenge and internal exhaustion now reinforce each other. This chapter therefore prepares the ground for the next ones by making a hard point: the United States cannot effectively answer Russian and Chinese pressure unless it first recovers a serious understanding of why rules, alliances, and institutions serve American interests. Without that intellectual and political renewal at home, the order Washington built will continue to weaken from both the outside and the inside.

Chapter 10 — Russian Global (Dis)Order

Chapter 10 begins by recovering a moment that now feels almost unreal: the brief period after the Soviet collapse when Russia’s new leaders genuinely imagined their country as a future member of the West. Michael McFaul uses his own encounter with Andrey Kozyrev to show how radical that opening was. Kozyrev did not want a special Russian path, a privileged sphere of influence, or a softened set of Western standards. He wanted Russia to join the same institutions as the democratic world on ordinary terms. The significance of the anecdote is not nostalgic. It establishes the chapter’s core argument: Russia did not emerge from 1991 fated to become the revisionist power it is today. The country once sought incorporation into the liberal order, and that lost possibility makes Putin’s later turn more consequential.

The chapter then traces how real that initial integration was. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Russia moved into Western-led institutions and habits of cooperation. It entered the G8, joined the Council of Europe, built mechanisms for cooperation with NATO, and eventually entered the World Trade Organization after years of negotiation. Even during the early Obama years, Washington still treated Russia as a state that might be pulled deeper into the existing order rather than one destined to challenge it. McFaul’s point is that the break was not immediate. The path from Yeltsin to Putin was not a straight line from Soviet collapse to neo-imperial revisionism. The liberal order tried to absorb Russia, and for a time Russia accepted that effort.

That trajectory ended in stages and then all at once. The annexation of Crimea in 2014 marked the decisive break, and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 finished it. McFaul argues that Putin no longer seeks status inside the post-1945 order; he seeks freedom from its restraints. What he wants is not a new coherent Russian-led institutional design, but a looser world in which great powers can coerce weaker neighbors, violate borders, and treat international law as optional. In that sense, Putin is not primarily a builder of an alternative order. He is a destroyer of the existing one. He prefers something closer to nineteenth-century power politics, where force matters more than rules and spheres of influence matter more than sovereignty.

This orientation explains Putin’s attitude toward multilateral security institutions. Russia still values the UN Security Council because its permanent seat and veto protect Russian power. But beyond that, Putin sees most security institutions as obstacles. He violates the core norms of territorial integrity and sovereign equality even while invoking them rhetorically when useful. McFaul emphasizes the hypocrisy: Putin condemns American unilateralism in Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere, yet uses those examples not to defend international law consistently but to excuse Russia’s own aggression. The result is a style of argument built around deflection rather than principle. Russia does not offer a stronger legal order. It exploits the weaknesses and inconsistencies of the existing one to justify further erosion.

The chapter is especially strong in showing that Putin’s project in Europe is negative rather than constructive. He wants NATO weakened, the OSCE blunted, and European security returned to bilateral bargaining in which Russia can pressure individual states one by one. His invasion of Ukraine failed in one important respect by driving Finland and Sweden into NATO, thereby enlarging the very alliance he wanted to diminish. Yet McFaul does not let that obscure Putin’s partial successes. Russian ties with nationalist and populist politicians inside democratic countries have helped strain transatlantic unity, and American uncertainty under Trump amplifies those cracks. So even when Putin loses strategically in one arena, he can still make the broader institutional environment less coherent and less confident.

McFaul treats the Collective Security Treaty Organization as the clearest example of Russia’s inability to build a serious counter-order. The CSTO was supposed to be a Russian answer to NATO, but in practice it functions mainly as an instrument for preserving Moscow’s influence in the post-Soviet space and protecting friendly autocrats. Its intervention in Kazakhstan briefly suggested renewed Russian regional dominance, yet its inability or unwillingness to defend Armenia in the Nagorno-Karabakh crisis exposed its limits. Russia’s broader habit is telling: it trusts unilateral force, informal pressure, and bilateral leverage far more than institutional commitments. Even its overseas basing footprint has become fragile, with losses and setbacks diminishing the image of a durable security architecture.

Russia’s strongest external relationship is with China, but even that is better described as an entente than as a formal alliance. McFaul presents the partnership as one of the defining differences between the current era and the original Cold War. Moscow and Beijing are joined by anti-Americanism, authoritarian solidarity, military cooperation, and growing economic complementarity. Joint exercises, deeper military-industrial links, and diplomatic coordination all matter. Yet the relationship is not symmetrical. Russia increasingly needs China more than China needs Russia, and Beijing still avoids being dragged fully into Putin’s most reckless moves. The partnership is real and dangerous, but it does not produce a stable, institutionalized bloc on the model of the old Soviet alliance system.

Outside Europe and China, Russia projects power opportunistically rather than systematically. In Asia, it has alienated Japan and South Korea while drawing much closer to North Korea, especially after the war in Ukraine created demand for ammunition and political backing. In the Middle East and North Africa, Putin works through disruptive bilateral ties, above all with Iran, while previously propping up Assad in Syria and maneuvering across rival camps without offering durable conflict resolution. McFaul’s portrait is of a state that can still make itself consequential in regional crises, but mostly by deepening instability, protecting armed clients, and profiting from disorder rather than by underwriting any shared rules.

The same pattern appears in Africa and Latin America. Russia’s return to Africa has centered on arms sales, mercenary deployments, and support for juntas and embattled rulers, with Wagner and its successor formations acting as tools of regime protection and anti-Western influence. In Latin America, Moscow has reinforced ties with Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua, using finance, weapons, and political backing to sustain governments hostile to Washington. These relationships matter, but they do not add up to a coherent Russian-centered regional order. They are transactional, asymmetric, and often tied to the survival needs of isolated regimes. Russia expands influence by entering weak spaces, not by creating attractive institutions.

On the economic side, the chapter shows a similar pattern of ambition outrunning capacity. Post-Soviet Russia initially tried to integrate into Western-led economic institutions, but later shifted toward regional alternatives such as the Eurasian Economic Union and toward forums such as BRICS. The EEU has some real institutional content, yet it remains heavily dependent on Russian weight and has failed to become a genuine rival to the European Union. BRICS gives Moscow a platform, but within it Russia is clearly the junior partner to China. Meanwhile, the war against Ukraine accelerated decoupling from the democratic world. Sanctions, corporate exits, asset seizures, and deeper cronyism have made Russia less integrated, less efficient, and less capable of shaping global economic rules.

The chapter closes by extending the same logic to political institutions. Russia once joined organizations associated with democracy, human rights, and rule of law. Under Putin it turned against them, treating liberal norms as instruments of Western domination and human-rights oversight as intolerable interference. The Kremlin’s break with the European Court of Human Rights and its increasingly hostile posture toward the OSCE and similar bodies reflect a deeper transformation. McFaul’s final judgment is severe and persuasive: contemporary Russia is not constructing a viable alternative world order. It is producing fragmentation, coercion, and institutional decay. Its global role is therefore best understood not as Russian order, but as Russian disorder.

Chapter 11 — China and the Global Order

Chapter 11 opens with a revealing memory from the Obama years. McFaul recalls hearing about the Trans-Pacific Partnership before he fully understood why it mattered. He later came to see that the central contest with China was not just military or technological; it was institutional. The side that writes, bends, and anchors the rules of the global economy gains a lasting strategic advantage. This is why he treats Trump’s withdrawal from TPP as a major self-inflicted error. It abandoned one of the few serious American attempts to offer partners an attractive economic structure that could balance China’s rise. The chapter’s premise is clear from the beginning: the struggle over global order is not abstract diplomacy but one of the main theaters of competition.

McFaul’s framework is useful because it separates China’s behavior by domain instead of treating Beijing as either a fully revisionist revolutionary power or a mostly satisfied stakeholder. In security institutions, China is comparatively cautious and often status-quo oriented. In economic institutions, it is far more ambitious and revisionist, seeking to reshape rules and build parallel structures that expand Chinese leverage. In political and normative institutions, especially those dealing with democracy, rights, and information control, it is the most disruptive. This differentiation is the chapter’s main analytic strength. It avoids the lazy habit of describing China with one sweeping label and instead asks what Beijing wants in each part of the international system.

In the security realm, McFaul argues, China still benefits too much from the existing architecture to want to tear it down. Its permanent seat and veto on the UN Security Council are major assets, and Beijing has invested heavily in the broader UN system through leadership positions, funding, and peacekeeping participation. Unlike Russia and the United States, China has generally avoided full-scale invasions beyond its borders in the post-Cold War period, which lets it present itself as a more disciplined guardian of sovereignty. For that reason, Beijing is not trying to overthrow the global security order. It wants an order that continues to constrain others while giving China enough room to protect its interests and expand its influence.

Yet China’s support for the security order is selective and self-serving. McFaul shows how Beijing shields regimes useful to its interests, weakens enforcement when principles become inconvenient, and ignores legal rulings that obstruct territorial ambition. The South China Sea is the clearest example: China signed onto the relevant legal framework, lost an international arbitration case, and then simply refused to accept the result. Similar tensions appear in its behavior toward Myanmar, Syria, North Korea, Hong Kong, India, and above all Taiwan. The pattern is not revolutionary rejection of the system as such. It is incremental revision: respect rules when they are useful, reinterpret them when possible, and violate them when the strategic gains look worth the cost.

China’s own new security initiatives remain thin compared with its economic activism. McFaul is skeptical of slogans such as the Global Security Initiative and of many of the conferences and forums Beijing sponsors. He treats them less as operational institutions than as political signaling devices that advertise Chinese seriousness and gather diplomatic followers. Even the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, though real, has produced limited concrete gains for China’s larger security ambitions. It helps normalize certain principles such as non-interference and state control over information, and it gives Beijing a platform in Central Asia, but it does not amount to a Chinese security alliance system. China, in fact, still prefers the language of “partnerships” to the burdens of formal alliances.

The one relationship that partially breaks that rule is Russia. McFaul describes the Sino-Russian connection as deep, personal at the top, and rooted in common hostility toward American primacy and democratic activism. But he also shows why Ukraine exposed a difference between the two partners. Putin has become radically destructive toward the existing security order; Xi remains more calculating. China has tried to support Russia enough to keep the partnership alive and gain strategic benefits from Western distraction, but not so fully that it destroys Beijing’s own stake in the broader system. This is why the relationship is both robust and uneasy. China wants Russia useful, not necessarily triumphant, and certainly not strong enough to drag Beijing into a generalized war with the West.

If security is the area of Chinese caution, economics is the area of Chinese creativity and pressure. McFaul refuses to claim certainty about Xi’s ultimate intentions, but he argues that behavior matters more than speculation. Since the global financial crisis of 2008, Beijing has become much more active in trying to shift the center of gravity of economic governance. It wants more influence inside legacy institutions such as the G20, the IMF, and the World Bank, not because it rejects them outright but because they are too important to abandon. China’s preferred method is reform from within combined with institution-building from without. That makes its challenge subtler than the Soviet Union’s was and, in some ways, harder to answer.

The parallel architecture Beijing has built is broad and increasingly consequential. McFaul highlights BRICS, RCEP, the Belt and Road Initiative, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the BRICS bank, regional summits, and a whole ecosystem of China-centered forums stretching across Africa, the Arab world, Latin America, Central Asia, and Europe. He also stresses efforts to internationalize the renminbi, create payment channels outside Western control, and reduce dependence on the dollar-centered financial system. What makes this ecosystem potent is that it usually does not force countries into a binary choice. States can borrow from Chinese institutions while remaining inside Western ones. That flexibility makes the Chinese offer far more difficult to counter than a rigid ideological bloc would be.

Even so, McFaul does not believe China is about to replace the United States as the unquestioned organizer of the world economy. He argues that Beijing still lacks the coalition, legitimacy, and institutional trust necessary to build a full alternative order. The dollar remains dominant, the richest democratic economies still matter enormously, and many countries that welcome Chinese money do not actually want Chinese primacy. In addition, some Chinese projects are beginning to generate backlash. Coercive behavior toward smaller states, risky lending, and overextension in initiatives such as the Belt and Road have exposed weaknesses in the model. China is powerful enough to alter the environment, but not yet powerful enough to remake it wholesale.

One of the chapter’s most important arguments is that deep economic interdependence will survive strategic rivalry. Both Washington and Beijing have reasons to reduce vulnerabilities, restrict technology transfer, diversify supply chains, and harden critical sectors. But neither side can simply excise the other from the global economy. Trade remains large, market incentives remain powerful, and corporate interests continue to resist a total break. McFaul therefore rejects both complacent globalization and fantasies of complete decoupling. The real problem for policymakers is not how to end entanglement, but how to manage it without giving the other side asymmetric advantages.

On political institutions and normative questions, China is more openly confrontational. Here McFaul presents Beijing as a determined opponent of the liberal claim that human rights and democracy are universal values. Chinese leaders promote alternative vocabulary centered on sovereignty, developmental priority, meritocratic competence, and “whole-process” democracy. They work inside multilateral bodies to blunt criticism of repression, build coalitions of supportive states, and normalize doctrines such as cyber sovereignty that justify domestic information control. In digital governance especially, Beijing and Moscow have found common cause. Yet even here the chapter ends on a note of complexity rather than simple alarmism. China sometimes cooperates with the United States on issues such as AI governance, and Xi’s broader strategy is still to move China closer to the center of the world stage, not necessarily to drive America off it overnight. That makes the challenge more gradual, more ambiguous, and potentially more durable.

Chapter 12 — Learning from Cold War Mistakes

Chapter 12 shifts from diagnosis to historical instruction. McFaul begins by challenging the triumphant American memory of the Cold War. The United States and its democratic allies did help defeat the Soviet bloc, but they were not the only protagonists, and they did not succeed without committing serious errors. Democratic movements inside communist societies, reformers within those regimes, and local political dynamics were decisive. At the same time, American policy often imposed terrible costs: lives lost, dictators empowered, resources wasted, and democratic credibility damaged. The chapter’s purpose is therefore not to deny Cold War success but to strip it of myth. Unless the United States learns from its own mistakes, it may repeat them in competition with China and Russia under worse conditions and with fewer advantages.

The first lesson is about threat perception. McFaul warns against a retrospective story in which the Soviet Union was always weaker than it appeared and therefore easy to defeat. That reading is comforting, but it is false. Soviet military power, ideological influence, and geopolitical reach were genuinely alarming for much of the second half of the twentieth century. The problem was not that Americans feared an illusion. The problem was that fear sometimes inflated estimates beyond reality and encouraged costly overreaction. This distinction matters because it helps McFaul avoid two bad habits at once: naive minimization of authoritarian threats on one side and maximalist panic on the other.

He applies that lesson directly to China. For decades, the United States underestimated the consequences of Chinese growth and convinced itself that economic opening might gradually produce political liberalization. McFaul says that correction was necessary, but that Washington has now swung too far. China is formidable, but it is not an existential threat in the literal sense, nor is it obviously on a path to worldwide domination. Beijing does not possess unlimited economic stamina, unlimited military reach, or a universally appealing ideology. A serious strategy therefore requires a net assessment rather than slogans. If policymakers describe China as all-powerful, they distort priorities, frighten partners unnecessarily, and make measured statecraft harder to sustain.

Russia poses a different analytic problem. American leaders spent years underestimating Putin’s intentions and Russia’s willingness to use force. Then, on the eve of the 2022 invasion, many overestimated Russian military effectiveness and underestimated Ukrainian resilience. McFaul uses this reversal to make a broader point: power cannot be measured only by inventories, spending totals, or formal capabilities. Leadership, morale, corruption, strategic clarity, and the willingness to fight matter enormously. Russia is weaker than China and weaker than many fear, but Putin himself remains highly dangerous because his ambitions are violent and his tolerance for risk is high. The right lesson is not that Russia is either negligible or unstoppable. It is that intent and capability have to be assessed together.

The next mistake is overreach. McFaul argues that containment became too expansive after the Korean War. The United States began treating almost every anti-colonial conflict, left-leaning government, or insurgent movement as a direct front in the struggle against Moscow. In doing so, it often failed to distinguish communism from nationalism and failed to see where local dynamics mattered more than superpower alignment. The domino theory helped justify this inflation of stakes, but history did not validate it. America did not need to fight everywhere to prevail overall. For today’s strategists, the message is obvious: not every Chinese investment, Russian client, or authoritarian gain is strategically decisive. A sustainable grand strategy must discriminate among theaters instead of universalizing every contest.

McFaul then turns inward to the domestic costs of Cold War excess. McCarthyism, in his telling, was not an unfortunate side episode but a central warning about how great-power rivalry can corrupt a democracy from within. Witch hunts, blacklists, and public suspicion damaged American freedom and punished innocent people without being necessary to strategic success. The contemporary implication is direct. The United States must not target citizens or immigrants of Chinese or Russian origin as if ethnicity itself were evidence of disloyalty. It should welcome talent, encourage defections of human capital from autocracies, and rely on focused counterintelligence rather than broad suspicion. A confident democracy gains strength by staying open, not by imitating the closed habits of its adversaries.

A related Cold War error was the willingness to back dictators in the name of anti-communism. McFaul is blunt on this point. Washington supported coups, tolerated repression, and armed brutal regimes across multiple continents because those governments were seen as useful against the Soviet bloc. In many cases, that policy not only betrayed democratic principles but also produced long-term strategic damage, strengthening anti-American movements and sometimes helping create later enemies. The lesson for the present is that competition with Beijing and Moscow cannot become an excuse for embracing every authoritarian government that claims to be on America’s side. Short-term alignment against a common rival does not automatically serve long-term democratic interests.

The same logic applies to development aid. During the Cold War, assistance was often distributed as geopolitical insurance rather than as a serious tool for institutional development. McFaul argues that aid too often propped up corrupt rulers, prioritized growth without accountability, and reflected the hope that prosperity alone would eventually generate liberalization. That approach frequently failed. For him, future assistance should be tied more tightly to governance, transparency, anti-corruption, and the strengthening of civil society, not merely to alignment with Washington. This is also part of the answer to Chinese influence. The United States should not respond to Beijing’s opaque and politically instrumental financing by gutting its own aid capacity or by copying Chinese methods, but by offering a cleaner and more credible model.

The chapter’s final movement is about “losing the peace,” which McFaul treats as one of the most consequential failures of the post-Cold War era. The collapse of communism did not guarantee democratic consolidation. In Eastern Europe, Western aid, institutional guidance, and the credible pull of NATO and the European Union helped stabilize new democracies. In most of the former Soviet Union, and especially in Russia, the result was much worse. McFaul argues that the democratic world did too little, too slowly, and with too much complacency. It assumed history itself would complete the job. That assumption left fragile institutions exposed to economic trauma, illiberal restoration, and security threats.

His judgment on Russia is especially sharp. Domestic causes mattered most, but the West could still have acted more seriously: more economic help during the painful transition, more insistence on dismantling repressive Soviet successor institutions, clearer pathways into democratic institutions for vulnerable neighbors, and stronger security support where backsliding might produce future aggression. Instead, the post-1991 moment was handled with far less urgency than the post-1945 moment. McFaul’s formula is memorable because it captures the contrast exactly: the next democratic opening in a major autocracy must be approached more like 1945 than 1991. Democratization cannot simply be admired from afar; it has to be materially, institutionally, and strategically reinforced.

The final point ties the whole chapter together. Democratic change in Russia or China, if it comes, will come mainly from within. The United States cannot manufacture revolutions at will, and attempts to do so can backfire. But when internal openings appear, democracies need to be ready to help them succeed. That is the unfinished lesson of the Cold War. Winning the rivalry is not enough if one then fails to shape the peace that follows. For McFaul, the catastrophe in Ukraine is the most brutal reminder of that truth. A democratic Russia in the 1990s would have changed the fate of the post-Soviet space. The next time history opens such a door—whether in Russia, China, or elsewhere—the democratic world will have no excuse for entering it unprepared.

Chapter 13 — Replicating Cold War Successes Today

Chapter 13 shifts the book from diagnosis to prescription. Michael McFaul argues that the United States should not imitate the Cold War mechanically, but it should recover the parts of that era that actually worked. His core claim is that America prevailed not only through raw power, but through a broader strategic ecosystem: deterrence, alliances, democratic legitimacy, international institutions, foreign assistance, global media, and economic vitality. He opens by arguing that Donald Trump’s second term is weakening precisely those tools, which McFaul sees as a form of strategic self-sabotage that benefits both Moscow and Beijing.

The chapter’s first major theme is deterrence. McFaul insists that the central achievement of the Cold War was not conquest but the avoidance of direct great-power war. That success, he argues, came from a calibrated mixture of military strength and disciplined engagement. For the current era, he recommends a similar approach: not dreams of restored American hegemony, but a level of military capacity sufficient to convince China and Russia that war with the United States would fail and prove too costly to attempt.

From that premise he builds a detailed deterrence program. He wants the United States to modernize its nuclear arsenal while emphasizing survivable systems, especially submarine-based capabilities, so deterrence remains credible without triggering a reckless arms race. He also argues for higher defense spending after the long post-Cold War drawdown, contending that the United States now faces two nuclear competitors rather than one. The point is not militarism for its own sake, but the restoration of a force posture serious enough to prevent miscalculation in Beijing and Moscow.

McFaul then turns to conventional military readiness. He argues that the United States must expand shipbuilding, missile production, munitions stockpiles, and cheap unmanned systems, taking lessons directly from the war in Ukraine. He is especially worried about the mismatch between Chinese naval expansion and American industrial limits, and he therefore supports tighter defense-industrial integration with allies such as Japan and South Korea. He also argues for stronger forward deployment in Europe and Asia, more resilient space infrastructure, and greater investment in emerging technologies such as AI, quantum-related systems, cyber capabilities, and biological resilience.

Alliances are the second pillar of the chapter. McFaul treats the US alliance system as one of the great strategic inventions of the twentieth century and argues that it remains America’s decisive comparative advantage over autocracies. In Europe, he wants NATO members to spend more, integrate more deeply, and continue tightening ties with Ukraine. In Asia, he favors stronger bilateral alliances, better intelligence coordination, deeper cooperation through the Quad, broader work with ASEAN states, and long-term preparation for more institutionalized regional security structures.

Taiwan receives special emphasis because McFaul sees it as the most dangerous flashpoint in US-China relations. He supports maintaining strategic ambiguity, but he pairs that with a much harder-edged deterrence posture: better Taiwanese asymmetric defenses, more stockpiled supplies, more resilient regional basing, and a clearer understanding in Beijing that invasion would trigger devastating nonmilitary consequences. He also argues that the United States should make clear that conquest would not deliver durable spoils, while continuing to avoid symbolic moves that would unnecessarily rupture the status quo before a war occurs.

Deterrence, however, is not enough. McFaul also wants a revival of arms control, crisis management, and diplomatic architecture. He argues that the Cold War’s later stability rested not only on weapons but on information, communication, and negotiated limits. That leads him to endorse renewed transparency measures, new talks on nuclear and conventional weapons, restored crisis channels, and broader diplomatic forums in Asia analogous in spirit to the Helsinki process and the OSCE. He knows these goals are hard, but his argument is that difficulty is not a reason to abandon them when the alternative is unmanaged escalation.

The chapter’s second large theme is democracy promotion. McFaul rejects the view that democracy support is moralistic distraction from realpolitik. For him, democracy promotion is both normatively justified and strategically useful, because democratic regimes are usually better long-term partners for the United States and because the ideological contest with autocracies cannot be won if America retreats from defending its own governing principles. Still, he is blunt that American democracy is currently damaged enough that the first task is domestic repair.

That domestic repair agenda is extensive. McFaul argues that the United States needs to strengthen voting rights, representation, immigration policy, constraints on executive power, and broader democratic legitimacy if it wants its example to matter abroad. He also insists that the American economic model itself must be renewed. A successful democracy must produce prosperity, innovation, and upward mobility, so he calls for stronger investment in research, education, industrial capacity, and talent attraction. He is explicit that America should compete with China by improving democratic capitalism, not by imitating authoritarian state capitalism.

On democracy promotion abroad, McFaul favors a more disciplined and less militarized approach than the one often caricatured by critics. He stresses that the United States rarely used force primarily to spread democracy and should not make military intervention the centerpiece now. Instead, he wants support concentrated on fragile democracies, democratic breakthroughs, election integrity, independent media, anti-corruption bodies, courts, parliaments, civil society groups, and activists in exile. Ukraine, in his view, is the frontline case: it needs not only security guarantees after the war, but also long-term institutional strengthening so that democratic success there can radiate outward.

He pushes this logic further by arguing that democracy assistance should become more direct, less bureaucratic, and more internationalized. He criticizes a donor system in which too much money is absorbed by intermediaries rather than activists on the ground. He therefore proposes larger roles for institutions like the National Endowment for Democracy, new democracy-focused foundations, stronger election-monitoring support, and even a digital platform that could connect funders, expertise, and democratic organizations more efficiently across borders. The basic idea is that democrats must network as effectively as autocrats already do.

The chapter ends by widening the lens from activism to institutional order. McFaul wants the United States to reassert leadership in the WTO, IMF, World Bank, UN, and global standard-setting bodies rather than abandoning them to Chinese influence or Trumpist disdain. At the same time, he argues that democracies should create tighter clubs of their own, including stronger trade and technology frameworks among like-minded states. His concluding point is sharp: the next American grand strategy should recover the Cold War’s real successes—credible deterrence, democratic confidence, alliance solidarity, and multilateral leadership—because those were the instruments that actually produced victory.

Chapter 14 — New Policies for New Challenges

If Chapter 13 is about reviving what once worked, Chapter 14 is about confronting what is historically new. McFaul argues that the present rivalry differs from the Cold War in several structural ways: the United States and China are economically intertwined, the international system is more fragmented, China and Russia are more closely aligned than Moscow and Beijing were during much of the Cold War, American isolationism is stronger, and domestic democratic erosion inside the United States is more severe. Those differences mean that copying old strategies wholesale would be intellectually lazy and strategically dangerous.

The chapter begins with the biggest structural difference of all: economic interdependence. McFaul rejects the maximalist case for total decoupling from China, which he sees as both unrealistic and self-defeating. He argues instead for selective decoupling, meaning a deliberate separation only in areas that directly affect national security, military modernization, critical infrastructure, and coercive leverage. His position is that economic ties are not inherently a weakness; they can restrain conflict, sustain prosperity, and preserve leverage, provided Washington is willing to draw harder lines where the stakes are genuinely strategic.

That selective approach leads to a long list of targeted restrictions. McFaul supports stronger export controls, investment screening, limits on technology transfer, tighter rules around telecommunications infrastructure, and more aggressive efforts to prevent American capital and research from helping Chinese or Russian military capabilities. He treats the fentanyl supply chain as a clear case where total severance is justified. But he repeatedly warns against turning national security into a pretext for indiscriminate economic nationalism, because once every commercial exchange is framed as existential, strategy gives way to panic.

Tariffs are where his critique becomes especially direct. McFaul argues that tariffs should be rare, targeted, and used only as a last resort. He sees broad tariff campaigns, particularly against allies, as economically damaging and strategically perverse because they weaken the very coalition the United States needs in order to compete with authoritarian powers. For him, fair competition disciplines firms and improves performance, while indiscriminate protectionism raises costs, invites corruption, and substitutes political theater for actual statecraft.

The same logic applies to supply chains. McFaul supports diversification, friend-shoring, and incentives to reduce dangerous dependencies, but he does not want Washington to micromanage entire production systems in the name of security. His preferred method is sober cost-benefit analysis rather than panic-driven restructuring. The objective is resilience, not autarky. Russia, however, is treated differently: because the relationship is already far more adversarial and far less economically important, he is more open to harder separation there.

Beyond reducing vulnerabilities, McFaul argues that the United States must compete more aggressively abroad. He wants Washington and its allies to offer credible alternatives to Chinese infrastructure finance and overseas investment, especially through vehicles such as the Development Finance Corporation and broader G7 initiatives. He does not claim that every Chinese investment project is sinister, but he does argue that when Beijing uses finance to gain strategic influence, the United States needs a larger toolkit, more capital, and greater patience. Competition, in his account, works better than blanket prohibition.

The chapter also highlights a less-discussed asymmetry: China has already pursued forms of decoupling of its own. McFaul points to censorship, platform exclusion, pressure on foreign firms, and broader efforts to reduce dependence on Western information systems. He argues that American firms and cultural institutions must stop adapting themselves to Chinese political sensitivities out of fear of losing market access. Alongside that, he calls for greater transparency regarding Chinese and Russian activities inside the United States, tougher scrutiny of illicit wealth and covert influence, and stronger protection against digital intrusion. Yet he is careful to say that vigilance must not become xenophobia toward Chinese or Russian individuals.

In one of the chapter’s clearest liberal arguments, McFaul says the United States should welcome more talent from China and Russia, not less. He sees students, researchers, entrepreneurs, and exiles as strategic assets for America and, in some cases, as losses for authoritarian rivals. The best answer to technological competition is not only to slow the other side down but to run faster oneself. That phrase captures a recurring theme of the chapter: defensive measures matter, but national renewal matters more.

McFaul then turns from economics to geopolitics. The world, he says, is no longer organized into two rigid camps. Powers such as India, and many states across the Global South, want room to maneuver between Washington, Beijing, and Moscow. He argues that the United States must learn to live with this fragmentation instead of demanding Cold War-style loyalty tests. Many countries will cooperate with Washington on some issues and hedge on others. Trying to force them into total alignment is more likely to alienate them than win them over.

This realist streak also shapes his discussion of the China-Russia partnership. McFaul dismisses the fantasy that the United States can peel Russia away from China through some reverse-Nixon maneuver. In his view, today’s alignment is too deeply rooted in shared interests, shared authoritarian affinities, and shared opposition to American power. Courting Putin in hopes of weakening Xi would cost the United States leverage and moral standing while delivering little. The more plausible objective is narrower: limit the depth of their cooperation where possible and exploit the fact that China still has more to lose from full rupture with the West than Russia does.

The chapter’s final movement turns inward, and it is the most alarming. McFaul argues that today’s great-power rivalry is not only between states but also within democratic societies themselves, above all within the United States. Isolationist impulses on both right and left, contempt for alliances, and the erosion of democratic norms have created vulnerabilities that did not exist at the same scale during the Cold War. He is especially worried by election denialism, partisan manipulation of institutions, and admiration among parts of the American right for Putin-style politics.

His conclusion is that no foreign policy can succeed if the republic at home is coming apart. There is no magic fix for polarization, but McFaul believes reforms can help and leadership matters even more. He draws hope from previous periods of American division that eventually gave way to renewal. Still, the warning is unmistakable: if the ideological conflict between autocracy and democracy now runs through the center of American politics itself, then the United States can no longer assume that domestic disorder is a separate problem from grand strategy. It is the grand-strategic problem.

Epilogue — Don’t Bet Against America Just Yet

The epilogue begins with a bleak assessment. McFaul argues that the age of uncontested American primacy is over, democracy no longer carries the same universal prestige it once did, and the liberal international order has entered a period of acute stress. The world has returned to open rivalry between autocrats and democrats, but this competition is in some respects even more dangerous than the Cold War. He points in particular to the increased plausibility of large conventional wars involving Russia or China, including a war over Taiwan that some strategists openly discuss as a near-term possibility.

He then sharpens the argument in a way that defines the book’s closing message: the United States is endangered not only by external challengers but by its own internal decay. Trump’s return to power is presented not as a normal alternation in policy, but as a force that actively strips America of the very advantages that helped it prevail in the twentieth century. McFaul’s claim is not that China and Russia are weak, but that the United States is making their job easier by weakening itself.

His first example is alliances. McFaul argues that America’s network of allies remains its single greatest strategic advantage over authoritarian rivals, since no comparable coalition exists on the other side. He therefore treats Trump’s attacks on NATO allies, talk of taking Greenland, hostility toward Canada, and distancing from Ukraine as strategically irrational. The damage is not merely emotional or symbolic; it creates doubt in Europe and Asia about American reliability, and doubt is corrosive in deterrence politics.

His second example is the battle of ideas. McFaul reiterates that democracy, human rights, and the rule of law long gave the United States a persuasive advantage over authoritarian systems. In his telling, Trump’s assaults on democratic norms, executive overreach, and open friendliness toward dictators erode that advantage from within. Cuts to USAID, democracy-promotion programs, international broadcasting, anti-disinformation efforts, and exchange programs are presented as especially self-defeating, because they dismantle the peacetime instruments through which America projected influence and supported like-minded forces abroad.

The third area is institutions. McFaul argues that the US-led economic and political order built after World War II was never perfect, but it served American interests and underwrote the prosperity of the democratic world. Trump’s tariff campaigns, contempt for multilateralism, and erratic approach to economic policy are therefore portrayed as attacks on one of America’s own greatest creations. Even the dollar’s position, McFaul suggests, can be weakened if Washington behaves like an unreliable steward of the system it once designed.

And yet the epilogue is not fatalistic. McFaul insists that the American-created order is wounded, not dead, and that much of the world still prefers continued US leadership to either Chinese dominance or a vacuum of anarchy. He argues that many governments complain about American inconsistency but still look to Washington first in moments of crisis. China, in his view, does not yet have either the legitimacy or the practical capacity to replace the United States as organizer of world order. Retreat by Washington would therefore produce disorder more readily than a coherent new hierarchy.

From there he restates the balance of power in broader terms. Militarily, he argues, the United States and its democratic allies still outweigh the authoritarian bloc, especially once alliances are counted rather than examining America in isolation. Economically, he acknowledges China’s immense manufacturing power and technological progress, but he stresses that the United States still has the dollar, the deepest financial system, leading universities, and many of the world’s most innovative firms. When allies are added in, democracies still dominate the commanding heights of the global economy.

On ideology, McFaul concedes that autocracies have momentum. China’s development model appeals to many governments, and Putinist conservatism has admirers well beyond Russia. Still, he argues that liberal democracy remains more attractive over the long run than authoritarian rule, and that the larger arc of modern history still bends toward more democracy, not less. That conviction matters because the book’s final argument depends on it: America should compete from confidence, not panic.

This is why the epilogue pivots from diagnosis to civic exhortation. McFaul says the United States needs a new grand strategy, but strategy alone is not enough. Two deeper conditions are required: confidence and unity. Americans, he argues, have become too fearful of decline and too susceptible to rhetoric that treats China as an unstoppable juggernaut. He rejects that mindset outright. China is formidable, but not inevitable; democratic decline is possible, but not destiny.

Confidence, for McFaul, does not mean complacency. It means remembering that the United States has renewed itself before after periods of pessimism, division, and apparent decay. He invokes earlier eras—the 1930s, the late 1960s, the early 1970s—to argue that democratic societies can recover and even emerge stronger. The United States should therefore stop trying to beat China by becoming more like China and instead restore faith in the comparative strengths of democratic government, open societies, alliances, and innovative capitalism.

Unity is the last and hardest demand. McFaul argues that Americans must keep debating major issues, including foreign policy, but they must do so within the basic rules of democratic life and with a minimum of civic decency. The greatest threat to American security, he says bluntly, is not China or Russia but the country’s own internal division. His closing note is therefore both analytical and moral: history is not mechanically determined, individuals matter, and Americans can still choose renewal over decline. They have done it before, and in his view they can do it again.

See also

• ill_winds_diamond_resumo — Diamond maps the same global democratic recession with greater emphasis on institutional mechanisms of erosion; the two books complement each other in analyzing how external autocracies exploit internal democratic weaknesses.
• fukuyama_political_order_decay_resumo — Fukuyama provides the institutional framework (state–rule of law–accountability) that explains why the Russian democratic transition of the 1990s failed; it is the theoretical substrate of McFaul’s historical argument about Russia as the “great lost case.”
• fukuyama_identity — Fukuyama’s analysis of thymos and identity explains the domestic resonance of Putinism — why democratic electorates are susceptible to the politics of authoritarian recognition and militant conservatism.
• wolf_crisis_of_democratic_capitalism — Wolf diagnoses the internal crisis of democratic capitalism that McFaul identifies as the central strategic vulnerability; the two converge on the argument that democracy must work economically in order to compete ideologically.
• democraticerosion — Vault file on mechanisms of gradual democratic erosion; McFaul’s exported Putinism is one of the external vectors in this process, alongside the endogenous factors covered in that entry.
• direita_radical — European and Brazilian authoritarian populism as a receptor of Moscow’s ideological export; McFaul’s chapter on Putinism is a direct parallel reading for understanding the transnational radical right and its resonance in bolsonarismo.