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born 1963 United States
Michael Anthony McFaul (born October 1, 1963) is an American academic and diplomat who served as the United States Ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014. McFaul is currently the Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor in International Studies in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University, where he is the Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
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We got to get our democracy in order at home, but we can walk and chew gum at the same time. Two wrongs do not make a right.
It’s incumbent upon all people to believe in the facts and to keep pushing it. You can’t constrain free speech, but you can speak more loudly about what is factual.
Today, however, Russia and China are united as autocracies. They do have this ideological connection. Both countries have tense relations with the United States and the liberal democratic world, and that brings them together.
I'm 100 percent for lifting sanctions on Russia, provided they change their behavior for why the sanctions were put in place. It’s just that simple.
I hope that from crisis and tragedy comes engagement. Don’t just complain about [an issue], do something about it! Don’t just lament about the current state of affairs, vote!
There is a big academic literature on under what conditions sanctions work and don’t work, on when they can change the behavior of targeted countries. And most times, they don’t work. That’s what the literature says.
The people working at the White House at the time are friends of mine, and they're friends of mine to this day. I don’t want to trivialize how difficult their decisions were. They did not have good choices.
If both China and Russia were liberal democracies, I don’t think we would be having conversations about great power competition. So I believe that regime type does matter, and the ideological dimension that comes with that regime type also plays a role in great power competition.
I speak in general. I think that Putin does not understand that criticizing power can help this power. How do we fight corruption in the United States? There are two forces - independent media and powerful opposition party.
We're not good at point predictions. But we are pretty good at some long-term trajectory things, over hundreds of years, right? Over hundreds of years, there's a pretty strong correlation between the more well-to-do a society is, the more educated it is, the more urban it is, the more income GDP per capita, the more likely there is to be demand for democracy.
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