The Power of Putin in Russian Foreign Policy

Michael McFaul’s article “Putin, Putinism, and the Domestic Determinants of Russian Foreign Policy” is well timed and likely to play a big role in shaping the debate about contemporary Russian foreign policy.1 The core argument is straightforward: President Vladimir Putin’s illiberal worldviews are a major driver of Russia’s international behavior. To be clear, McFaul acknowledges that other factors inouence Russian behavior as well. In particular, he stresses that the balance of power enables Putin to pursue a confrontational foreign policy, but the balance of power does not motivate or cause his actions (pp. 102–105). Similarly, Russia’s increasingly authoritarian political system serves as a permissive condition, concentrating decisionmaking authority in the hands of Putin (pp. 114–117). Thus, while McFaul recognizes that power and regime-type variables affect Russia’s international behavior, the heavy causal lifting is done by Putin’s illiberal conservatism and anti-Western mindset. The argument is intuitively compelling. On closer inspection, however, it fails to convince for four reasons. First, the article’s research design is oawed. By exploring only cases of Russian interventionism (e.g., Syria and Ukraine), McFaul is selecting on the dependent variable. In effect, he omits cases in which Russia abstained from intervention—although Putin’s anti-liberal mindset would have pushed him to interfere. Consider, for example, Russia’s response to the Velvet Revolution in Armenia. In May 2018, a wave of street protests erupted in Yerevan, demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Serzh Sargasyan, who had been in power for ten years. The opposition made it clear that its ambition was to move the country in a more democratic direction. Thus, according to McFaul’s thesis, Putin should have provided assistance to the Sargasyan regime to crack down on the protesters. This, however, did not happen. Instead, Putin adopted a wait-and-see policy and, after Sargasyan’s resignation, established cordial relations