Home / Quotes / Quote by Michael McFaul

Quote by Michael McFaul

“Russian military is a quintessential reflection of the state that created it. Autocratic, security-obsessed, and teeming with hyper centralized decision making, dysfunctional relations between civilian and military authorities, inefficiency, corruption and brutality. [Professor Zoltan Barany, January 2023]”

Book:Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder – The Former Ambassador's Bold Vision for Confronting Authoritarian Threats

Work

Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder – The Former Ambassador's Bold Vision for Confronting Authoritarian Threats

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Michael McFaul

Michael McFaul is an American academic and diplomat. He served as the U.S. Ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014. He is currently the Steven P. Roach Professor of International Studies at Stanford University. more

“Learning to live with wounded places is a mission threaded with find¬ing and making beauty. If I’m open to the likelihood of it, I can always find beauty under any circumstances, whether it’s in a kindly gesture from a stranger or the first shoot of greenery shoving up through the waste of a calamitous event. Beauty is the antidote to grief and despair, and it is the one sure thing I can bring to bear when I confront a place that has fallen on hard times.”

Spirituality Grief Beauty Despair Personal Growth

Book:Radical Joy for Hard Times: Finding Meaning and Making Beauty in Earth's Broken Places

Source: Radical Joy for Hard Times: Finding Meaning and Making Beauty in Earth's Broken Places

“Vladimir Putin has done more than anyone on earth to strengthen the NATO alliance.”

Russia Putin Ukraine Nato Russian Invasion

Author:Tony Blinken

“Trump didn't want to win the election. He wanted to use the platform to boost his brand. Russia wanted him to win the election. Russia succeeded, and Trump continues to use his platform to boost his brand.”

Trump Russia Putin Politics Insanity

Author:Ed Krassenstein

“Putin was a former KGB intelligence officer who’d been stationed in East Germany at the Dresden headquarters of the Soviet secret service. Putin has said in interviews that he dreamed as a child of becoming a spy for the communist party in foreign lands, and his time in Dresden exceeded his imagination. Not only was he living out his boyhood fantasy, he and his then-wife also enjoyed the perks of a borderline-European existence. Even in communist East Germany, the standard of living was far more comfortable than life in Russia, and the young Putins were climbing KGB social circles, making influential connections, networking a power base. The present was bright, and the future looked downright luminous. Then, the Berlin wall fell, and down with it crashed Putin’s world. A few days after the fall, a group of East German protestors gathered at the door of the secret service headquarters building. Putin, fearing the headquarters would be overrun, dialed up a Red Army tank unit stationed nearby to ask for protection. A voice on the other end of the line told him the unit could not do anything without orders from Moscow. And, “Moscow is silent,” the man told Putin. Putin’s boyhood dream was dissolving before his eyes, and his country was impotent or unwilling to stop it. Putin despised his government’s weakness in the face of threat. It taught him a lesson that would inform his own rule: Power is easily lost when those in power allow it to be taken away. In Putin’s mind, the Soviet Union’s fatal flaw was not that its authoritarianism was unsustainable but that its leaders were not strong enough or brutal enough to maintain their authority. The lesson Putin learned was that power must be guarded with vigilance and maintained by any means necessary.”

Power Russia Putin Authoritarianism Berlin Wall Vladimir Putin