It’s been a homecoming week for John F. Tefft, the American diplomat with a knack for serving as the U.S. ambassador in nations as they undergo historic and often tumultuous times.
Tefft last week made his first trip back to Georgia, where he served as U.S. ambassador in Tbilisi from 2005 to 2009, during the presidency of Mikheil Saakashvili and Russia’s five-day war that led to the loss of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. There he attended a conference on Sept. 11-12 sponsored in part by the McCain Institute.
He also made the rounds in Kyiv for his first trip back since serving as U.S. ambassador from 2009 to 2013, a tenure that saw the end of the Orange Revolution dreams and the rise of popular discontent that led to the EuroMaidan Revolution in the switch from Viktor Yushchenko to Viktor Yanukovych as Ukrainian president.
He also served in Lithuania from 2000 to 2003, the year before the Baltic nation joined NATO.
But the crowning end of his 45-year career in the U.S. Foreign Service came in Moscow as U.S. ambassador from 2014 to 2017, a bad and stressful time in U.S.-Russian relations because of the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine since 2014 and its interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
“This provided a good opportunity for us to travel to two places we care about,” Tefft said of his trips to Georgia and Ukraine with his wife, Mariella, in a Sept. 15 interview with the Kyiv Post on the sidelines of the 15th Yalta European Strategy conference, where he was a speaker. “Mariella and I look back on our time in Ukraine with fondness. It’s great to see our friends and we’ll be here again. You’ll see more of us.”
Tefft, a 68-year-old native of Madison, Wisconsin, is now serving as a senior fellow for the Rand Corporation, gathering his thoughts for a possible book and living in Springfield, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C., so that he can be close to his two daughters and two grandchildren living in Arlington, Virginia.
“We spent 11 of our last 12 years in the Foreign Service abroad, so we’re making up for lost time,” Tefft said of his move closer to his family.
He’s trying to “sort out” the lessons of his career for U.S. foreign policy by reflecting on his experiences and reading, including the books of Ukrainian-American history Serhii Plokhii, author of such books as “The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union” and “The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine.”
“I’m trying to find this larger context to understand the events of our time,” he said.
Moscow ‘wasn’t easy’
His last station in Moscow “wasn’t easy,” Tefft said. “There was a lot of harassment by Russian security services and others. It was not an easy time for Americans or, for that matter, other diplomats in Russia. Even before I got there, there were efforts to curtail the impact of American and Western European diplomats. We tried to travel as much as we could around Russia with my wife Mariella. We would set up a schedule the day before and then get a call from a governor who would say: “We can’t have a meeting tomorrow. We received orders.’”
To get around the official restrictions, Tefft said that “my embassy worked extremely hard to communicate with people on social media, the main vehicle for young people and people of many oblast capitals to get their information. Russian TV is so heavily propagandistic that people don’t watch it anymore. It’s not a good source of news.”
He managed to escape the personal vilification of his predecessor, Michael McFaul, his predecessor from 2012 to 2014, who was targeted by the Kremlin for black PR and who faces criminal charges if he returns to Russia. “Michael was there at a particularly difficult time,” Tefft said, noting that it coincided with Putin’s bid for re-election as president amid rising protests against his autocratic rule. “It was a cynical and negative campaign, where America had to be the bad guy and the fall guy, Mike, came to personify that.”
Tefft believes the U.S. and its Western allies are doing the right thing with targeted sanctions against Russia designed to get the Kremlin to call off its war against Ukraine and moderate its aggressive stance globally.
The sanctions, he said, “have had some effect,” but need to be calibrated so that average Russians aren’t victimized and keep thinking positively about America. One recent poll from the independent Levada Center in Russia heartened him with findings that 76 percent of Russians want better relations with America. “I took that as a good sign,” he said.
The sanctions bother Putin’s inner circle by banning their visits to America and the European Union, he said, while the restrictions on long-term loans and technology transfers are harming the Russian economy.
The collective West, he said, will be in a stronger position to combat the Kremlin if it reduces its energy dependence on Russia, which now supplies Europe with about a third of its natural gas supply.
Putin’s 3 mistakes
Tefft said that Putin has his vulnerabilities.
He believes the Kremlin strongman, in power for more than 18 years, has made three fundamental mistakes: the failure to conduct economic and political reforms, the 2014 war against Ukraine and interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
The consequences of these mistakes are obvious, he said. On the economic front, Russia is “falling further and further behind” in some areas, he said. “When all is said and done, the fundamental challenge for Russia is to become a modern state; in some ways they are; in many ways, they are still not there. There’s a timidity to take on some of these things” amid the “rampant corruption and the huge amount of money that’s been stolen from the state.”
As for Ukraine, “a lot of people are dying for an idea whose time has passed,” Tefft said of Russia’s historic desire to look at Ukraine as a region of Russia rather than an independent nation.
The fundamental change, he said, is occurring in the new generations of Ukrainians who have turned against Moscow for a long time to come. “The Russian aggression has changed minds substantially here,” he said.
As for the meddling in America, Putin’s actions have strengthened bipartisan support in the United States for tougher sanctions against Russia, he noted.
Tefft is also encouraged by the 29-nation NATO military alliance’s policy of “deterrence and dialogue” with Russia.
“NATO came up with a real solid program to reinforce and protect the new NATO nations of Central and Eastern Europe. I think it was balanced, it was clear, but it was not excessive,” Tefft said. “People in Moscow wouldn’t tell us that but I think they understand.”
Another consequence is how Ukrainians have turned away from the Kremlin. “The Russian aggression has changed minds substantially here,” he said.
Russia’s leaders, he said, still haven’t decided whether they are going to be law-abiding members of the international community or continue invading its neighbors.
But, despite the stresses on the European Union with migration, globalization and Russia, Tefft said that he remains “a believer in a Europe that his whole, free and at peace.”
“You can’t give up on dreams. We have to set the high goals and work for them every single day, despite the odds.”
