McFaul, Michael

Michael Anthony McFaul (born October 1, 1963) is an American academic and diplomat who served as the United States Ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014. McFaul is currently the Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor in International Studies in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University, where he is also the Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is also a contributing columnist at The Washington Post. Prior to his nomination to the ambassadorial position, McFaul worked for the U.S. National Security Council as Special Assistant to the President and senior director of Russian and Eurasian affairs. In that capacity he was the architect of U.S. President Barack Obama's Russian reset policy.

Born in Glasgow, Montana, McFaul was raised in Butte and Bozeman, where his father worked as a musician and music teacher. While attending Bozeman High School, McFaul participated in policy debate; his partner was current U.S. Senator Steve Daines (R) of Montana.

While an undergraduate at Stanford University he spent time in the Soviet Union, first in the summer of 1983 studying Russian at the Leningrad State University (now Saint Petersburg State University), and then a semester in 1985 at Pushkin Institute in Moscow. He earned a B.A. in international relations and Slavic languages and an M.A. in Slavic and East European Studies from Stanford in 1986. As a Rhodes Scholar, he earned a DPhil in international relations from St John's College, Oxford, in 1991. He wrote his dissertation on U.S. and Soviet intervention in revolutionary movements in southern Africa.

In 1994, McFaul and one-time close friend and colleague Sergey Markov helped found the Moscow Carnegie Center.

McFaul's past engagement with Russian political figures included a denunciation of him in 1994 by Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the Liberal Democratic Party and a member of the State Duma (the Russian parliament), and a subsequent shooting incident in which a shot was fired into McFaul's office window in Moscow. Two years later, Alexander Korzhakov, a confidante of Russian President Boris Yeltsin, invited McFaul to the Kremlin during the 1996 Russian presidential election, because of McFaul's research on electoral politics.

In his capacity as a professor of political science at Stanford University, McFaul was the director of the university's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. A Hoover Institution Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow, McFaul is a Democrat who was the architect of U.S. President Barack Obama's policy on Russia.

In 2009, McFaul joined the Barack Obama administration as a senior adviser in Washington, D.C., where he was the architect of the so-called "Russian reset" policy. In 2011, Obama nominated McFaul to be the 7th post-Soviet United States Ambassador to the Russian Federation. On December 17, 2011, the United States Senate confirmed McFaul by unanimous consent. McFaul became the first non-career diplomat to be the U.S. ambassador to Russia.He arrived in Russia just as massive protests were erupting over Vladimir Putin's resumption of the presidency. As ambassador he was often controversial, meeting with Russian pro-democracy activists and commenting frequently on Twitter in English and Russian.

McFaul announced his resignation as ambassador to Russia on February 4, 2014, effective after the Sochi Olympics. In a blog post, he expressed his gratitude for the job and his sorrow at leaving Moscow, but explained that originally he had planned to spend only two years in the Obama administration, and after five years, his family desperately wanted to return to life in California. John F. Tefft was confirmed as the next ambassador to Russia.

McFaul returned to Stanford as a professor of political science and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He continued to be involved in geopolitics. In October 2014, he stated that he believed the Russians continued to bug his and his wife's cell phones in the United States. He is currently on the Kremlin's sanction list of people who are not allowed to enter Russia.

After the 2016 election he became a regular commentator on MSNBC and social media, and has frequently been critical of the policies and actions of President Donald Trump with regard to Russia. McFaul supported the Iran nuclear deal. In July 2019, McFaul wrote that Communist Party of China's officials "champion the advantages of their system — an ability to undertake massive infrastructure projects, the capacity to manage income inequalities and a commitment to harmony in government and society. In contrast, polarized U.S. politics in the Trump era seem to impede any major initiative, be it infrastructure development or addressing income inequality."

McFaul and his wife, Donna Norton, married in 1993 and have two sons, Cole and Luke.