From Cold War To Hot Peace Quotes

“Minister Lavrov, he said, well, you know, we don’t like it when you have so many NGOs coming to Russia. And I said, well, send Russian NGOs to the United States. [Laughter.] We’ll be happy to have them. And I really mean that. I think the more exchange and the more . . . cross-fertilization the better.”
― Michael McFaul, From Cold War To Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin's Russia

“To win reelection, Medvedev had to win one vote: Putin’s. To win that vote, Medvedev above all else had to demonstrate his unique abilities to work with Obama to achieve results that were good for Russia. We had just handed the Russian president a defeat at the very moment when Medvedev believed Putin was deciding his fate. It played into the narrative of Medvedev’s critics back home that he was weak and susceptible to being pushed around by the Americans. The momentum for missile-defense”
― Michael McFaul, From Cold War To Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin's Russia

“I also believed that the Snowden affair marked the end of one of the most confrontational periods in U.S.-Russian history. I thought then that we had hit the bottom and therefore there was nowhere to go but up, though it would take years to climb out of the hole we were in. I was wrong. Things could, and did, get worse.”
― Michael McFaul, From Cold War To Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin's Russia

“America’s greatest national security nightmare would be the emergence of an authoritarian, imperialist Russian regime supported by a thriving market economy.”13 A decade later, that’s exactly what happened.”
― Michael McFaul, From Cold War To Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin's Russia

“Arms control [that is, the Cold War treaties regulating U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals] did not end the Cold War. Rather, it was the collapse of communism and the emergence of democracy within the Soviet Union and then Russia that suspended the international rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. If a new nationalist dictatorship eventually consolidates in Russia, we will go back to spending trillions on defense to deter a rogue state with thousands of nuclear weapons.”
― Michael McFaul, From Cold War To Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin's Russia

“Putin had acquired de facto control of Russia’s three largest and most important television channels before the end of his first year in office.”
― Michael McFaul, From Cold War To Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin's Russia

“By the end of his second term in 2008, Putin had redefined Russia’s role in the world, largely, but not completely, in opposition to the United States and the West.”
― Michael McFaul, From Cold War To Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin's Russia

“For the siloviki—Russian military and intelligence officials—the NATO campaign in Serbia confirmed their theory about American imperial intentions. In their view, little had changed since the Cold War era, except that Russia was much weaker in 1999 and therefore lacked the means to counter American military aggression. The proper response, therefore, was not to kiss and make up, as the naive, aging Yeltsin opted to do, but to rebuild Russian military forces. One of the intelligence officers who held this view was Vladimir Putin. The following year, he became president.”
― Michael McFaul, From Cold War To Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin's Russia

“As I wrote in 1995, “America’s greatest national security nightmare would be the emergence of an authoritarian, imperialist Russian regime supported by a thriving market economy.”13 A decade later, that’s exactly what happened.”
― Michael McFaul, From Cold War To Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin's Russia

“United fronts against something are always easier to maintain than coalitions for something.”
― Michael McFaul, From Cold War To Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin's Russia

“History shows that democracies rarely go to war with each other.6 So a democratic Russia would no longer be an enemy of the United States. A”
― Michael McFaul, From Cold War To Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin's Russia

“Four months later, Yeltsin met with the leaders of Belarus and Ukraine to sign the Belovezhskaya Accord, which peacefully dissolved the Soviet Union.”
― Michael McFaul, From Cold War To Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin's Russia

“Individuals matter. Leadership matters. A different American president might have adopted a more cautious approach to engagement with this communist leader. Reagan, however, dared to be bold.”
― Michael McFaul, From Cold War To Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin's Russia

“In the winter of 1985 I learned from Russian friends a perfect saying to describe the system: “We pretend to work, they pretend to pay.”
― Michael McFaul, From Cold War To Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin's Russia

“A new ideological struggle has emerged between Russia and the West, not between communism and capitalism but between democracy and autocracy.”
― Michael McFaul, From Cold War To Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin's Russia

“Sometime between the Obama-Medvedev summit in Prague in 2010 and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014, public opinion in both countries also flipped: solid majorities in both Russia and the United States now perceived each other as enemies.”
― Michael McFaul, From Cold War To Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin's Russia

“On the metro home that night, I struggled with a dilemma that would haunt me for decades. Was I an activist or an academic?”
― Michael McFaul, From Cold War To Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin's Russia

“(A Russian television series called Sleepers, in which the United States is plotting to overthrow the Russian government, began airing in the fall of 2017. In the show, the U.S. ambassador is blond; his name is Michael. They haven’t forgotten about me yet!)”
― Michael McFaul, From Cold War To Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin's Russia

“And then Donald Trump won.”
― Michael McFaul, From Cold War To Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin's Russia

“And now we were done. Our efforts had failed. I was not a Cold Warrior itching to get back into the arena with a Kremlin adversary; ever since my high school days debating Jackson-Vanik, I had held a different aspiration for our bilateral relationship. But Putin’s actions in Ukraine compelled the United States and Europe to pivot to a fundamentally different strategy for managing relations with Russia. We were not returning to a Cold War, but we were entering a new confrontational era, a hot peace. On March 23, 2014, I spelled out my proposed”
― Michael McFaul, From Cold War To Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin's Russia

“She told me that the call had been a deliberate move to let all of Russian officialdom know about her views on my performance. As she wrote in her memoir, “I made a point of calling him on an open line one night, and speaking very clearly so all the eavesdropping Russian spies could hear, I told him what a good job he was doing.”
― Michael McFaul, From Cold War To Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin's Russia

“Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak hosted me at his residence for a particularly warm, elaborate, and meaningful dinner. He invited all of my friends in the U.S. government, as well as a few of my important informal outside advisors who had participated in developing the ideas of the Reset. Three years earlier, Kislyak and I had started our relationship with our fists up. But over the years, he had grown on me. We were very different people in so many ways, and yet I felt like we clicked. He”
― Michael McFaul, From Cold War To Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin's Russia

“Everything in government seems to take longer than it should. My vetting process dragged on. Making sure the subsidies embedded in my Stanford mortgage did not violate conflict-of-interest rules took several weeks to resolve. Even though I already had a top secret security clearance, I had to get a new one to become ambassador. That”
― Michael McFaul, From Cold War To Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin's Russia

“Putin, it seemed, didn’t see how intervention in Libya could produce a good outcome for Russia; instead, he viewed Russia’s abstention as Medvedev caving in to American influence. In the name of advancing the Reset, Medvedev had just violated a central principle of Russian (and Soviet) foreign policy: resisting American military interventions”
― Michael McFaul, From Cold War To Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin's Russia

“Biden’s national security advisor, Tony Blinken, didn’t like that format; he felt it disadvantaged Biden, as Medvedev had primary responsibility in his government for foreign policy and all things American, while Biden was not our point person for Russia. Obama was.”
― Michael McFaul, From Cold War To Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin's Russia

“Soon thereafter, Tom asked me to write up dozens of one- to two-page case studies of transitions from authoritarian rule over the last fifty years,”
― Michael McFaul, From Cold War To Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin's Russia

“In my experience, historical analogy is the analytic method of choice for senior foreign policy makers trying to get a handle on world events unfolding in real time. When trying to understand a new problem, they rarely use or even read analyses informed by social science methods such as game theory, statistical data, or randomized control trials. And logically, these analogies are made to historical cases with which the individuals are most familiar. I watched this play out dozens of times during my five years in government, and it was particularly striking during our struggles to understand the Arab Spring, and especially events in Egypt in the winter of 2011.”
― Michael McFaul, From Cold War To Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin's Russia

“While assessing the agreement’s ultimate success would have to wait several years, the JCPOA ranked at the time as one of the biggest foreign policy achievements of Obama’s presidency.”
― Michael McFaul, From Cold War To Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin's Russia

“The result of all these unrealized schemes, however, was that Obama and Putin did not speak again for the next three years, until Putin became president again. No matter what the Russian constitution said, that lack of contact was not good for U.S.-Russian relations.”
― Michael McFaul, From Cold War To Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin's Russia

“As we were landing, the plane’s medical staff offered us some kind of stimulant to help keep us awake for the day, while also warning us not to take the drug if we planned on competing in a marathon anytime soon. I had no big races on my agenda, so I took the drug, and was amazed at how well it worked. I also marveled at the fact that I could get this drug on Air Force One, but probably not from my doctor back home.”
― Michael McFaul, From Cold War To Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin's Russia