In any good horror movie, the psychopathic killer is decidedly ordinary, even a little boring. Entering a sleepy hamlet quietly, he slaughters his unsuspecting victims without fanfare, and is unmasked all too late.
Similarly, the recent appointment of an obscure Stanford academic to Obama’s foreign policy team garnered only a few lines in a handful of local papers, and a paragraph from a Politico blogger (thanks to FPA Russia Blog reader Simon Radford for bringing it to our attention).
Yet the words “Michael McFaul will serve as…senior director for Russian and Eurasian affairs at the National Security Council” should strike terror into the collective heart of all sane Russia observers.
So how can a second rate professor with a Rod Blagojevich hairdo and a grammar problem destroy US-Russian relations? Read on to find out….
WHO IS MICHAEL MCFAUL?
Iraq war cheerleader, advocate of Russia’s catastrophic economic shock treatment and apologist for Yeltsin’s authoritarianism: McFaul was indeed a man of many jobs.
But for anyone who has served time doing Russia studies over the last decade, McFaul is best remembered as the author of ‘Russia’s Unfinished Revolution’, that vile textbook stuffed down the throats of newbie Kremlinologist wannabies. John Dolan’s definitive review of the book is here. 
A mediocre political scientist but a consumate bully, McFaul cashed in on the euphoria surrounding the economic and political ‘democratisation’ of Eastern Europe. Peddling mass privatisation and the manichean narrative of ‘Plucky Democratics vs Evil Revanchist Communists’, he became a useful academic salesman for the Clinton administration’s policy of shock therapy and the political support of its guarantor, Boris Yeltsin.
In his role, McFaul came to rival Stalin’s airbrushers in his talent for politically motivated historical whitewashing by extolling the virtues of the “‘shock therapy’ of the mid-1990s, which has recently been documented in the Lancet to have “led to 3 million premature deaths in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. In Russia in particular rapid privatization was a continuing factor to the five year drop in life expectancy between 1991 and 1994, resulting in an estimated 1 million premature deaths”.
But the worst thing about McFaul is his complete absense of any convictions, beliefs or moral code. While he is instinctively a middle of the road liberal, McFaul is the archetypal chameleon, grovelling to whoever happens to be in power, shifting his views to acquire fresh patronage.
Here is an excellent summation of the way in which McFaul, previously a big Clinton insider, disavowed his previous appraisals and radically changed his views to accomodate the then new Bush administration’s more aggressive stance on Russia.
Perversely, McFaul’s utter sychophancy gives me some hope. He is too spineless, too beholden to whichever direction the wind is blowing, to redefine any existing policy or intellectual atmosphere. Instead, he will safely pander to the ruling ideology and produce the requisite ‘academic’ works to bolster it.
The same, unfortunately, cannot be said for Larry Summers, another high profile Obama man with a decade long history of screwing up Russia (who deserves a post all for himself).