McFaul's May and June 2024 Newsletter

My most recent projects and publications

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Since I left the government in 2014, I have been writing a monthly newsletter sharing my activities and publications. Here is the one I wrote for May and June 2024! As always, I welcome your feedback!

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Today’s newsletter is a little late – one month late to be exact! – because, for the past months, I have been working intensely on my upcoming book: Autocrats Versus Democrats: Lessons from the Cold War for Dealing with China and Russia Today. On June 14, I finally sent my editor a complete draft of the manuscript – a huge milestone for me and my team. The good news is that the book is half the length it was last year. The bad news, it is still probably too long.

The end of the Spring Quarter is also a hectic time at Stanford, culminating in a graduation weekend. Graduation is always bittersweet. To those who graduated, stay in touch! On graduation day, I managed to attend five different departmental ceremonies, including catching a very moving speech at the International Relations ceremony from a Ukrainian graduate, Catarina Buchatskiy, and watching Dasha Navalnaya pick up her diploma at the Psychology ceremony. To the entire Stanford graduating Class of 2024, congratulations!

The day after graduation, I flew to South Korea and Japan to attend conferences and give talks with several colleagues from Stanford. Here you can watch one of our sessions in Tokyo. My experience in both places only underlined how important strong allies are for advancing American national interests in Asia and beyond. You can read my reflections on Substack. Despite my book deadline, I tried to stay engaged with the current events and wrote “Biden’s Excellent Week of International Leadership” and “Biden Should Stop by the Ukraine Peace Conference” right before Biden’s trip to the D-Day commemoration ceremony in France and G-7 Summit in Italy. I also was in South Korea when Putin traveled to North Korea for the first time in two decades. That coincidence generated many interviews for me in which I encouraged South Korea to do more to aid Ukraine. If North Korea was giving arms to Russia, South Korea has the right to give arms to Ukraine,

On NBC, I also commented on Biden’s D-Day speech and the signing of a long-term U.S.-Ukraine security agreement at G-7.

In May, at Freeman Spogli Institute and Stanford, we hosted many visitors, including the EU High Representative Josep Borrell. We also launched a new Taiwan Program to examine Taiwan’s challenges and opportunities and hosted many high-level industry leaders and scholars for its inaugural conference Innovate Taiwan: Shaping the Future of a Postindustrial Society. Equally impressive, earlier in May, FSI’s Cyber Policy Center convened cyber and tech ambassadors from over 25 countries, including high-level representatives from Australia, Denmark, the United States, and Brazil to discuss their national digital strategies. Last but not least, Ukrainian leader Sergiy Leshchenko delivered a fantastic, provocative lecture: 2024: A Decisive Year in Russia’s War in Ukraine.

On Substack in May, amid pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses across the United States, I shared my diary of what it was like working and living at Stanford campus as a professor at the time. In light of widespread protests in Georgia against the Russian foreign agent law, I urged the democratic world to step up and support Georgian civil society right now. I wrote about it here and discussed it with TV Rain Newsroom here. And once the new $60 billion military assistance to Ukraine got approved, following a six-month delay due to Republican dysfunction in the U.S. Congress, I wrote “Biden Needs Ukraine to Start Winning Again.” Lastly, I joined Mark Lippert at the CSIS’s The Capital Cable to talk about Russia-North Korea cooperation way before a Russia-DPRK deal was signed. You can watch it here.

I continue to coordinate the International Working Group on Russian Sanctions and remain in close contact with my Ukrainian colleagues. In June, we published our latest (20^th) paper: Export Controls: A Key G-7 Tool to Halt Russia’s War. As always, we are looking for new ideas, so if you have any, please share!

This week, I have spent in Washington watching the historic 75^th anniversary of the NATO alliance from the sidelines. As a “curtain raiser,” as they say in the media, I wrote this piece praising President Biden and his team for the work they have done to expand and strengthen the NATO alliance. Watch for more commentary on NBC/MSNBC and elsewhere about the summit as it unfolds.

At FSI, we have many more events coming up this summer. To stay updated on events, opportunities, and policy recommendations by scholars at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, please sign up for FSI email blasts and follow us on LinkedIn. As always, feel free to share your comments on the content below and any suggestions for improving this newsletter. To sign up for the newsletter, please click here. I hope you join us here at FSI and Stanford for our amazing events!

Sincerely,

Mike