Former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul believes President Vladimir Putin is fighting against the tide of history and that Russian society will not “tolerate disenfranchisement and oppression forever.” In an interview with The Moscow Times touching on topics from Putin through sanctions to arms treaties, Barack Obama’s former man in Moscow said it would be “crazy” to think the current Russian political system can survive the next 20 years. “The history of autocracies is pretty clear — oppression can work for a long-time, but it can’t work forever,” McFaul said from his Stanford University office in California, where he is now a professor of international relations. “Russians are too smart, too wealthy and too connected to the outside world to tolerate disenfranchisement and oppression forever. History is on the side of those who want to see Russia return to being a normal, boring, democratic European country.”

McFaul, who crafted the U.S.-Russia “reset” under Barack Obama before serving as ambassador from 2012 to 2014 is now banned from travelling to Russia under Kremlin sanctions — the first former U.S. ambassador in 60 years to be blocked from entering the country. During his time in Moscow — which saw the return of Vladimir Putin to the presidency, an escalation in the Kremlin crack-down on independent opposition and civil society and a souring of U.S.-Russia relations — McFaul was regularly attacked by Russian state media, who said the ambassador had been sent to Russia to “foment revolution.” Such attacks, which Mc Faul says “continue to this day,” seem only to have emboldened his belief in Russia’s democratic future. “Before revolutions occur, they seem impossible, and after they occur, they seem inevitable. That underscores how bad we are at predicting these kind of events, but it also underscores that democracies are the most stable systems of government,” he said McFaul added that autocracies can last for a long time, citing the example of the Chinese Communist Party, which just surpassed the Soviet Communist Party in the length of its grip on power, “but history is against them … they tend to topple at some point along the way.” In a sign of the anti-Russia consensus in Washington following the annexation of Crimea, war in eastern Ukraine, downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, and interference in the 2016 U.S. election, Democrat McFaul said he backs the Trump administration’s policy towards Russia. He cited the provision of lethal military aid to Ukraine and the extension of sanctions as key achievements. Now, he says, Trump’s top priority should be to secure an extension to the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) — the Obama-era deal due to expire in February 2021 which limits both countries’ nuclear arsenals. “It would be a giant mistake for my government to let that treaty lapse, and if I could recommend just one thing that the Kremlin and Washington seek to achieve before the end of the Trump administration — or at least the first term of the administration — it would be to extend that treaty for five years,” McFaul said.