WASHINGTON, D.C. Aug. 6 (DPI) — New Yorker Editor David Remnick recently penned a profile of his friend Michael McFaul, Obama’s former ambassador to Russia. And Remnick’s nonjudgmental narrative  backhandedly confirms that McFaul – a Stanford-educated Russian scholar, a political activist in his youth and longtime promoter of democracy in Russia – was the wrong man for the job. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/11/watching-eclipse Remnick – also unintentionally – indicts his friend Barack Obama on his decision to appoint McFaul to the ambassadorship in December 2011.  McFaul’s tenure, which ended for “family reasons” in February 2014, was marked by growing US alienation from – and waning influence with — the Putin regime, which felt provoked and offended by McFaul’s ongoing cultivation of the small pro-Democracy movement in Russia.

McFaul in the last week has gone on a PR offensive to claim the rightness of his cause while ambassador to Russia, running commentaries in Politico and The NY Times criticizing Putin and questioning the reach of his power.  McFaul wrote this week in Politico:

(Putin) has succeeded in convincing most Russians that the United States is an enemy of Russia – and he did so well before this latest crisis over Ukraine and the correspondingly massive anti-Western propaganda on Russian media. In 2010, roughly two-thirds of Russians had a positive view of the United States. Today, the same percentage now has a negative view. Propaganda works. This effective campaign in turn has helped Putin crack down on Russia’s democratic opposition, since they are portrayed as puppets of the United States.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/08/putin-the-not-so-great-109711.html#.U-JOTbHD5cM McFaul’s comments in The New York Times last week only confirm – to Putin, at the very least – that McFaul was no one to do business with, diplomatically or otherwise: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/07/opinion/to-beat-putin-support-ukraine.html Such commentary may score McFaul professional points now, but it didn’t help the US’s relationship with the Kremlin, during what turned out to be a critical time. It’s the view of many US experts that Vladimir Putin – the embodiment of Russian insecurity in the post-Soviet age, who controls virtually all the nation’s political power – should never have been provoked and isolated the way he was by the US envoy, especially given the US’s aggressive expansion of NATO over the last two decades. Remnick, who spent several years as the NYT’s Moscow correspondent, won a Pulitzer Prize for a 1994 book on Russia. Earlier this year he wrote another lengthy and nuanced essay on the Obama presidency. http://www.dpi.com/2014/01/air-force-one-effect-new-yorker-editor-gentle-on-obama-highlighting-an-old-dilemma/