In Autocrats versus Democrats, you examine key moments in the evolution of US–Russia relations, for example, in chapter one, you highlight the failure of the US to offer a post-Soviet “Marshall Plan.” In hindsight, how did the missed opportunity of deeper Western investment in Russia's early economic transition alter Russia's political evolution as well as today's geopolitical realities?

When I look at failures in American foreign policy—and I do for both US–Russia and US–China relations in the book—one of the biggest failures I see is the one you just described. Had we been as engaged in Russia in the first instance (and all the other post-Soviet countries in the second instance) in trying to deepen markets, strengthen democratic institutions, and bring them into the West like we did at the end of World War II with Germany, Italy, and Japan, we might have avoided this current period of confrontation with Russia.

Now, why did we not do that? First and foremost, there was not a big threat to the United States to our security interests at the time, like there was at the end of World War II. The main motivation for the “Marshall Plan” then was the fear of the Soviet Union—fear of communism that lingered in the East. So we wanted to consolidate democracies in Italy, France, and Germany as bulwarks. We did not have that in 1992, the year after the Soviet Union collapsed; China was not as strong as it is today. Had it been, it might have been different.

Second, there was some complacency on our side—including from me personally. It was this euphoric moment. I was a Fulbright scholar at Moscow State University in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. That collapse was the result of demands from Russian, Ukrainian, Estonian, and Polish societies for democracy. We sometimes forget to credit the role of these mass movements against autocracy and for democracy, including inside Russia. They won. Many of us thought the whole world was going to become democratic. Francis Fukuyama famously wrote The End of History and the Last Man. That turned out to be premature.

Third, US domestic politics intervened. In 1992, we had a presidential election. There was this rather obscure governor from an obscure state who ran on “It’s the economy, stupid.” He argued that the previous president George H. W. Bush, was spending too much time on foreign affairs and not enough on domestic affairs. That obscure governor from Arkansas became President Clinton. Once in office, he became a globally engaged president again. But 1992 was a critical year in the history of Russia. Right when Russia needed us most to be engaged, we were not. We were focused internally and that was a pretty big mistake.

You explain how Russia shifted from cooperation to confrontation under Vladimir Putin. At what point did you personally realize that this turn was irreversible under Putin, and what indicators confirmed it?

As I write in the book and have written before, Putin was an accidental president; there was no groundswell of support for him and his ideology. Moreover, Putin evolved in his ideas over the last 25–26 years—that is my view. I met Putin in 1991—indeed we go way back. I later worked with him when I was in the Obama administration for five years. He later banned me and once wanted to indict me; I have not been back to Russia ever since. Following his career, though, I think he changed over time. He was not locked into anti-Westernism from the very beginning.

There were three turning points, or phases. First, he was for markets and for engagement with the West. He even talked about Russia joining NATO. That said, he was never for democracy. I wrote my first op-ed warning about this in the Washington Post in March 2000; it was called “Indifference to Democracy.” It was already clear to me right when he came into power that he was going to dismantle democratic institutions. The United States cooperates with other countries that are not democratic, so there was a period—especially after September 11, 2001—of cooperation. Putin said, “I know what that feels like; my country was attacked too,” and the presidents of both countries came together. President George W. Bush and President Putin had a special relationship in 2001–2002. In 2002, Bush announced his plan to do a massive expansion of NATO, and it was not a big deal. That is another bit of revisionist history: the issue was not NATO expansion then, because there was cooperation.

A second turning point had to do with the expansion of democracy, not NATO. The first was the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine. There was a falsified, stolen vote, but democratic forces inside Ukraine documented it and there was massive mobilization to overturn it. This movement was eventually victorious. The person Putin was supporting, Viktor Yanukovych, was ousted, and the pro-democratic leader, Viktor Yushchenko, took over. That was a big turning point in Putin’s mind because he thought we were behind it. He thought that the United States was fomenting revolution against his ally in Ukraine. We even talked to him about it when I was in the White House. When President Obama saw Prime Minister Putin in 2009, he kept blaming us for these “color revolutions,” and Obama said, “We’re not doing that. I was against the war in Iraq; we are not going to foment revolutions.”

Then the next big turning point was the 2011 parliamentary elections in Russia, which had been falsified by normal Russian standards. This time, unlike Ukraine in 2004, the opposition documented the falsification and said, “We are not going to just take this—we are going to protest for free and fair elections.” Hundreds of thousands of people went into the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg. That is when Putin again blamed President Obama, blamed Secretary Clinton—and that is right when I became Ambassador in 2012. He blamed me for fomenting revolution against him. That was the beginning of the end of the cooperative period between our countries.

The last punctuation mark was the massive demonstrations in Ukraine to protest President Yanukovych’s pivot away from Europe. That ended with a change of government—the Revolution of Dignity in 2013–2014. Putin calls it a CIA-inspired coup d’état. That is when he invaded Ukraine the first time. When he could not undermine the democratically elected government through disinformation and other hybrid warfare techniques, he launched the full-scale invasion in 2022. That was the point of no return.

In Autocrats versus Democrats, you also analyze in detail the evolution of US-China relations. With the benefit of hindsight, was deep economic engagement with China a strategic error, a necessary bet that later needed guardrails or something else? What principles should guide American “de-risking” now that avoid a counterproductive decoupling with China?

In retrospect, bringing China into the global economy and the WTO should have been done with more constraints and guideposts, pushing them harder to adhere to the rules of the game. We moved too fast and did not press hard enough on enforcement. We also underestimated the negative effects that integration would have on our industrial base here in the United States. And we did not pay enough attention to the dependencies we were acquiring with China, for example, dependencies on rare earths and other critical minerals we need to build things in the West, including weapons. That was just bad policy; we should never have allowed that to happen.

Having said all that, I do not believe it would be in America’s national interest to completely decouple the Chinese economy from the American economy. That is more or less what we had with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. I do not think it is feasible. Moreover, in trying to do it, I think we will fail. And if we fail, we are going to be weak and isolated while the rest of the world continues to trade and invest with China. Therefore, separation is not the right strategy. Instead, we need much more diversification, not separation, with allies and partners. I give the Biden administration credit in this book since it helped to do that.

Furthermore, we have got to run faster at home instead of just focusing on tripping up the Chinese. We need to do more in terms of innovation in order to be more competitive. Unfortunately, some of the things President Trump is doing are the exact opposite of that. I do not think his tariff policy is strategic. It is alienating a lot of our partners around the world, including democratic partners, in ways that are not in our long-term economic or strategic interests.

Research and development are extremely important. One of the great advantages we had during the Cold War was massive investments in R&D and building some of the best universities in the world. Washington’s policies now are hurting that—both by withdrawing money for research and by alienating students from all over the world who are thinking twice about studying in the United States. Those are really bad ideas. We benefited by building world-class universities; that helped us attract the smartest, most talented people around the world. Lots of them wanted to come here and stay. Where I live in Silicon Valley, some of the most successful companies in the world are founded and run by immigrants. That is part of our superpower in competing with China. We have got to get back to that instead of dismantling it.

You lay out a forward-looking strategy in section three of your book. What are the actions that the United States should take in the near to medium terms to strengthen democracy at home and abroad?

I have worked on this book for years. I wrote most of it before President Trump was re-elected. The urgency of the prescriptive chapters is even greater now that President Trump is our new leader.

Over the last 300 years, there have been three debates in American foreign policy. The first is between isolationists and those who believe in international engagement. A second debate has been between unilateralists, who want to go it alone, and multilateralists, who think we are better off cooperating with other countries and participating in multilateral international institutions. The third debate is between realists and liberals. Realists focus on the balance of power between states. Liberals say it matters what kind of regime exists inside states; democracies behave differently than autocracies, and democracies are more cooperative.

We have had all three debates since the beginning of the American republic. Over the last 80 years, we have had them without veering to extremes. They also do not line up neatly between Democrats and Republicans. In the “liberal” category—whether we should promote democracy—Ronald Reagan was, in a positive sense, the most “liberal” Republican in believing in promoting democracy, whereas Nixon, another Republican, was a realist. So it does not map cleanly onto party lines.

Today, Trump is extreme on all three. He is an isolationist when it comes to the use of power, a unilateralist, and he does not believe in promoting democracy. Those are big mistakes. In the book, I outline why it is in our security interests, our prosperity, and our ideals to be engaged in the world, to do it multilaterally, and to promote democracy.

Now, to specifics. We have to do things differently. We should not dream about recreating the U.S. Agency for International Development as it was created by President Kennedy in 1961 to compete with the Soviets. But we do need economic and political assistance with new mechanisms; they should be more online, more decentralized, and more international. Tech companies have disrupted markets for buying goods; why not do that in the democracy-promotion world? I call it the International Platform for Freedom—a kind of eBay for democrats. We do not need to go back to the old ways, but we do need to lean in.

I fear that if we pull back and think we can go into it alone, we will lose in this era of great-power competition with the Chinese—and their sidekick, the Russians. That is not a world in America’s national interest, and it is not in the interest of the international system as a whole. So I would like small-d democrats—whether they are in democratic societies and governments like South Korea, or living in exile outside Iran, China, Russia, or Belarus—to be connected. Bringing the small-d democratic world together would be good for America’s national interests and good for the system as a whole.