I just mailed off the final chapter of my [new book](https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/autocrats-vs-democrats-michael-mcfaul/1147170175?ean=9780358677871) on competition between autocratic and democratic great powers in the twenty-first century, focused on China, Russia, and the United States. It draws on lessons from the cold war to argue that the world’s democratic camp, anchored by the United States, has not just more collective economic and military power than its autocratic camp, anchored by China and Russia, but better ideas about how to govern. And yet by the time the book comes out in October I am not sure which side the US will be on. In words and actions, President Trump seems to have more affinity with the autocrats than with the democrats—and particularly with the most belligerent, imperial autocrat in the world today, Vladimir Putin.
In previous eras of great power competition between autocratic and democratic countries, up to just a few months ago, the US’s allegiances were never seriously in question. The US government was not, of course, always firmly on the side of democracy: often it demonstrated indifference to—even sometimes actively impeded—other nations seeking independence; at times it propped up anti-Communist dictators and even supported coups against democratically elected leaders, as in Iran in 1953 and Chile in 1973; and since the 1990s it has maintained ties with autocrats, especially in the Middle East. But through all these years it was nonetheless recognized as the leader of the free world, both by other democracies and by democratic leaders fighting against autocratic regimes in their own countries. American soldiers fought against fascism in World War II; American diplomats and aid workers promoted democracy throughout the cold war and then with even greater vigor after the superpower rivalry with the Soviet Union ended in 1991. Now, suddenly and shockingly, President Trump seems to want to abandon that position. This would be a tragic mistake for anyone in the world who believes in democracy, but also for those concerned with America’s long-term national interests.
Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it seemed like the whole world wanted to join the democratic camp. As a student at Leningrad State University in 1983 and the Pushkin Institute in 1985, I delivered letters from relatives in the United States to Jewish refusniks in the Soviet Union who’d been blocked from emigrating. As a teaching assistant for a Stanford overseas program at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, in the summers of 1986 and 1987, I attended mass at a church in nearby Nowa Huta in support of Solidarity, and met with brave academics and intellectuals defying communism. At Stanford, as a graduate student at Oxford, and as visiting scholar at the University of Zimbabwe for the summers of 1988 and 1989, I participated in the transnational movement against apartheid. I returned to Moscow in 1990–1991 to witness and, in the margins, assist the mass movement for democracy there, led by Democratic Russia, the largest political movement in the country at the time demanding democratic reforms and Russian independence from the Soviet Union.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the democrats of the world were clearly winning. Excited about their prospects, I moved back to Moscow in 1992 to open the office of an American organization called the National Democratic Institute. We were the invited guests of Russia’s new, democratic government. Just because we were Americans—from one of the oldest and most respected democracies in the world—we were treated like rock stars.
Those euphoric days of a global embrace of democracy now seem long gone. In the years that followed, American presidents made decisions that cut against the grain of the liberal international order, including bombing Yugoslavia in 1999 and, even more controversially, invading Iraq in 2003. In 2000 Putin became Russia’s second post-Soviet leader and gradually asserted greater control over political institutions, media, and society. Meanwhile, an autocratic China emerged as the second-most powerful country in the world. The democratic promise of the Arab Spring, which began in 2011, was not realized. Some of my pro-democracy friends in Belarus, China, Egypt, Iran, Russia, and Syria were forced into exile, while some in Russia were killed, including my friends Boris Nemtsov in 2015 and Alexey Navalny in 2024. In 2014 Ukrainians who led the successful Revolution of Dignity, another democratic breakthrough, then had to endure the first Russian invasion, including the annexation of Crimea. According to the research unit at Freedom House—one of the most respected assessors of political freedom in the world—the global democratic movement has been in a recession for almost two decades.
And then, in February 2022, Russia launched a full-scale war against Ukraine. In his presidential address on the eve of the invasion, Putin made clear that he sought the country’s total subjugation and the overthrow of its democratically elected president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and his government. Just months before the invasion began I hosted Zelenskyy at Stanford, where he warned me that Putin aimed to destroy democracy in Ukraine by any means necessary. The night before the invasion my Ukrainian friend Svitlana Zalishchuk texted me, “Can’t believe we have to fight alone with him.” For all small-d democrats in Ukraine and around the world, those first weeks of the war seemed like the lowest moment of the post–cold war era. Most people in Kyiv and Washington predicted that Russian soldiers would be occupying Kyiv in a matter of weeks.
Putin’s army, however, failed to achieve that goal. Three years later, they have been able neither to annex or subjugate all of Ukraine nor to overthrow its government. Ukrainian soldiers have been most decisive in thwarting Putin’s imperial aims, but they did not fight alone. The democratic world provided weapons to Ukraine’s army, economic support for Ukraine’s government, and sanctions against Russia’s economy. I thought that President Biden should have provided more and better weapons to Ukraine more quickly, and imposed more and better sanctions on Russia more effectively. Still, there was no doubt what side the United States was on—at least until a few weeks ago.
In just that brief period, Trump and his revolutionary agent, Elon Musk, have made that question more difficult to answer. They have radically scaled back a powerful instrument of American soft power, the US Agency for International Development (USAID). They are also trying to close Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, Radio Martí, and other media organizations funded by the US government—another crucial tool for competing with Chinese and Russian media outlets around the globe. Reports suggest that Trump aims to reduce our diplomatic presence in the world, reduce the number of American soldiers in Europe, and, in time, maybe even withdraw from alliances with other democracies in both Europe and Asia, even as he decimates the American federal government at home. All these moves are gifts to autocrats in China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela.
Trump appears to see the world as divided not between autocrats and democrats but between the strong and the weak—and he evidently wants to be on the side of the strong, regardless of how they govern. He seems eager to return to the nineteenth century, when great powers staked out their respective spheres of influence and carved up their colonies. It has been a long time since an American president spoke so aggressively about wanting to annex new territory, from Gaza to Greenland, the Panama Canal, and even Canada.
In words, Trump and his team still claim to be trying to mediate an end to the war in Ukraine. In deeds, they seem to be trying to force Ukraine to surrender. To Ukraine they have offered only sticks: abandoning the prospect of NATO membership, issuing ultimatums about the need to give Russia nearly a fifth of Ukraine’s territory, pausing military aid and intelligence sharing, demanding that Ukraine repay past American aid by giving the US parts of profits from future mineral mining, humiliating Zelenskyy in the Oval Office with cameras rolling. To Russia, Trump and his team have offered only carrots: restoring diplomatic relations, supporting Putin’s war aims of annexing large chunks of Ukraine and keeping Ukraine out of NATO, hinting that the US might lift sanctions and make big economic deals. (Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, attended the meeting between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Riyadh.) For Zelenskyy, this administration seems to have only biting insults; for Putin, only praise and admiration.
This reversal is unprecedented in American history. It is as if the US had switched sides during World War II and told Churchill that Great Britain needed to surrender to Hitler in the interests of peace. It is, of course, an embarrassing and immoral decision. My democratic friends in Ukraine—as well as in Belarus, Russia, Taiwan, and Venezuela—feel abandoned. Putin cannot and should not be an ally to the United States. His government has grabbed Ukrainian territory since 2014 and, for over three years, murdered and terrorized innocent Ukrainian civilians with rockets and drones. Ukrainians living under Russian occupation in the country’s southeast have endured torture, rape, displacement, robbery, and kidnapping. Within Russia, to preempt any protest to his brutality in Ukraine, Putin has deepened his dictatorship, arresting or chasing into exile the country’s few remaining independent journalists, civil society leaders, and political opponents. Last year Putin’s regime killed Russia’s most popular democratic leader, Alexey Navalny.
But even if you don’t care about morality—even if you think international politics is just a clash between great powers in which good and evil or democracy and dictatorship don’t matter—there are clear, pragmatic reasons why joining the autocratic camp will damage American security and economic interests in the long term.
First and foremost, throughout American history the country’s enemies have been dictatorships, while democracies have been its most reliable and enduring allies. To be sure, the US has benefited from alliances with dictators temporarily, including, for instance, when it joined forces with Stalin to defeat Hitler. But that relationship fell apart soon after the end of World War II. Any attempt on Trump’s part at rapprochement with Putin will be fleeting and unstable, in large measure because Putin will neither abandon his closest and most stable ally, Xi Jinping, nor deviate from his own longstanding animosity toward the US. In my own meetings with Putin, while working at the White House or our embassy in Moscow, it was clear that he sought to weaken the US and the West more generally. Putin will use any rapprochement with Trump to foster polarization within the US and division within the democratic world. The American people, meanwhile, will hardly support an alliance with Putin: recently a poll by the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute found that 81 percent of Americans don’t trust him. Putin knows as much.
Embracing Putin also means abandoning our democratic allies in Europe, including Ukraine, which would eventually mean reducing trade and investment ties with the large, prosperous European Union market to try to do “deals” with a much smaller and much more corrupt Russian economy controlled by one man and his cronies. Moreover, if Trump abandons our NATO allies now—by signaling that he wants to withdraw American soldiers from Europe or, even worse, threatening to annex Canada and parts of Denmark— the US should hardly expect these democracies to stand with it when it seeks to contain China.
Abandoning Ukraine also sends a terrible message to all the US’s other allies and partners about the credibility of the Trump administration’s commitment to their security—be they Lithuania and Poland in Europe or South Korea and Taiwan in Asia. If the US indicates that it is no longer willing to support weaker democracies from rising autocracies, we should anticipate more wars, including ones that we might eventually be dragged into.
Finally, as in the cold war, the US’s democratic ideas remain among its best “cards”—to use one of Trump’s preferred metaphors—in competing with China and its allies over the next several decades. Small-d democrats around the world, whether presidents in Ukraine and Taiwan or democratic activists in exile fighting tyranny in Venezuela or Iran, still yearn for a strong United States to be on their side. If Trump abandons them, America’s influence worldwide will diminish dramatically. I hear this fear every day from my small-d democratic friends around the world. An isolated America, an America that no longer inspires others, is a weaker America.
I still hope it is not too late to stop Trump’s embrace of Russia at the expense of Ukraine. Our elected representatives should use hearings to launch a public debate about the wisdom of his actions. I want to hear Secretary Rubio defend, in public, the decision to join forces with Putin. I want members of Congress who disagree with Trump to condition their support of future budgets on restoring aid to Ukraine. Through phone calls, town hall meetings, and demonstrations, American voters can also make sure their representatives know that they do not support Trump’s appeasement of Putin. All Americans should be fighting to keep the US on the side of the democrats. It is not just the right thing to do; it’s the smart thing to do.