Free Republic

Before he headed to Moscow in January 2012 as Barack Obama’s new ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul was itching to get out of government. He had dreams of moving back to Palo Alto. The weather’s nice, his family missed the place. But Obama had come to rely on McFaul, a longtime Russia scholar and the National Security Council’s point man on the country. So he offered him a posting he couldn’t decline. McFaul’s academic specialty is revolution—a detail that Vladimir Putin, hounded by a bubbling uprising, immediately seized on. State television vilified McFaul as the man Washington had sent to...

In November of 2013, Russian media reported that U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul would soon resign; McFaul emphatically denied he was going anywhere. Yet today, he announced his resignation. Izvestia and Gazeta.ru reported the news back in November. […] McFaul is the chief architect of Obama’s “reset” policy with Russia, a policy that diagnosed Vladimir Putin not as a dangerous foe of the U.S. but as a misunderstood statesman who had been alienated by Republican policies inspired by Ronald Reagan. In practice, “reset” was McFaul’s euphemism for appeasement. The results of this policy were completely predictable: sensing weakness, Putin...

U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul, apparently agitated that Russian TV cameras greet him at every turn in Moscow, posted several tweets Wednesday, including one in which he asserted, “Everywhere I go NTV is there.” A few hours later, Mr. McFaul tweeted: “I respect the press right to go anywhere & ask any question. But do they have a right to read my email and listen to my phone?

ItÂ’s the only way of sending a clear message to Obama that he must reverse course on Russia.In a recent op-ed for the Moscow Times discussing the nomination of Michael McFaul as the USAÂ’s next ambassador to Russia, Dmitri Trenin of the Carnegie FoundationÂ’s Moscow Center listed a trio of gifts that McFaul should bring with him to Moscow: memberships in the World Trade Organization and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and repeal of the Jackson-Vanik amendment to the 1974 Trade Act.Conspicuously absent from TreninÂ’s essay was the mention of one single specific tangible thing that America might...