Foreign Policy

Emma Ashford | 10.28.2025 8:00 AM

Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder, by Michael McFaul, Mariner Books, 544  pages, $35

If you were looking for a human avatar of America's unipolar moment, you couldn't do better than Michael McFaul. Picture a youthful, energetic McFaul with a newly minted Ph.D. bounding into the suddenly post-Soviet space of the early 1990s, full of bright ideas about democracy and faith in the end of history. As McFaul himself puts it, 1991 "was a glorious moment to be a democratic, liberal, capitalist, multilateralist, and American….I was treated like a rockstar."

History, however, was undeterred. From his perch in the Democratic Party's foreign policy elite, McFaul had a front-row seat for the twists and turns of U.S. foreign policy. As an adviser on national security to President Barack Obama and later as Obama's ambassador to Russia, he watched the U.S.-Russia relationship worsen; he negotiated Russia's fateful abstention from the United Nations Security Council vote authorizing NATO intervention in Libya. He became an informal advisor to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign and then a commentator for MSNBC, where he drew connections between resisting President Donald Trump at home and promoting democracy overseas.

McFaul's new book, Autocrats vs. Democrats, highlights the brighter moments of that arc while........

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