As the U.S. presidential election swings into high gear, speculation about a second-term Trump foreign policy is also becoming more intense. Would he push radical changes to policy on China, or Ukraine, or the war in Gaza? Can his campaign promises be taken at face value? Would he be reined in—by staff, Congress, or his own aversion to risk? 

Kori Schake has been one of Trump’s fiercest critics among Republican foreign policy hands. Schake is a senior fellow and director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of Safe Passage: The Transition From British to American Hegemony. She served on the National Security Council and in the U.S. State Department under President George W. Bush. Yet even while warning of the consequences of a second Trump term, she shares the view that U.S. foreign policy needs to change—to align with what she calls a new conservative internationalism that would invest in American strength without neglecting the rest of the world.

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

As the war in Gaza grinds on, Israel’s endgame remains unclear. What does it mean to destroy Hamas? Who will provide security and govern Gaza when the fighting stops? How has this war changed Israel’s relationship with its neighbors and the wider world?

To discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the future of Gaza, Foreign Affairs Editor Daniel Kurtz-Phelan moderated a panel on August 1 that included Audrey Kurth Cronin, Marc Lynch, Dennis Ross, and Dana Stroul. Cronin is director of the Carnegie Mellon Institute for Strategy & Technology and the author of How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns. Lynch is a professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University. Ross is a counselor at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a professor at Georgetown University, and a former U.S. envoy to the Middle East, serving in senior national security positions in the Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Clinton, and Obama administrations. Stroul is director of research at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East.

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

Martin Indyk has probably spent more time and energy than anyone else—certainly more than any other American—trying to find a path to peace among Israel, its neighbors, and the Palestinians. He’s worked on these issues for decades. Indyk served as President Barack Obama’s special envoy for the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations from July 2013 to June 2014.  He served as U.S. ambassador to Israel from 1995 to 1997, and again from 2000 to 2001. He also served as special assistant to President Bill Clinton and senior director for Near East and South Asian affairs at the National Security Council from 1993 to 1995 and as assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs in the U.S. Department of State from 1997 to 2000.

He spoke to Foreign Affairs Editor Daniel Kurtz-Phelan on April 1. The conversation covers the prospect of a cease-fire in Gaza; how the Biden administration is, and is not, using its influence to shape Israeli actions; and the possibility that this terrible war could finally move both sides toward a two-state solution.

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

More than any time in the last 75 years, we’re living in a world at war. Conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine dominate headlines. But that’s just part of it. Last year, Azerbaijan seized Nagorno-Karabakh, forcing thousands of ethnic Armenians to flee. There’s a full-scale civil war in Myanmar. In Africa, there is war in Sudan, Ethiopia, and Congo, and there have been seven coups on the continent since August 2020.

Comfort Ero, the head of the International Crisis Group, has been tracking these conflicts as closely as anyone. She has watched the international system grow more brittle and less effective at preventing war—and has been doing the hard political work of ending conflict once it breaks out.

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

India has enormous momentum. Its population has surpassed China’s, making it the most populous country in the world. Its economy is expected to become the world’s third largest in the next few years. And, as much as any country, it seems positioned to take today’s geopolitical tensions and turn them to its advantage.

The country’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, is expected to win a third term in office this spring, cementing his own political dominance. But that has come with a dark side—an assault on civil rights and democracy, which some warn will ultimately hinder India.

To address Modi’s third term and India’s future more broadly, Foreign Affairs editor Daniel Kurtz-Phelan moderated a panel including Alyssa Ayres, Ashley J. Tellis, and  Pratap Bhanu Mehta. Ayres is Dean of the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University and an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Tellis is the Tata Chair for Strategic Affairs and a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. And Mehta is Laurence S. Rockefeller Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton University.

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

A year ago, protests began to rock Israel. For months, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets to protest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to weaken the country’s Supreme Court. Then came Hamas’s attack on October 7, and everything changed.

“The war has caught Israel at perhaps its most divided moment in history,” writes Aluf Benn in a new piece for Foreign Affairs. Benn, the editor of Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, argues that Netanyahu worked to divide Israeli society with policies that put the country on track for disaster.

He spoke to Foreign Affairs Executive Editor Justin Vogt on February 27.

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

Four months after Hamas’s October 7 attack, the war in Gaza continues with little reason to think that Israel is particularly close to achieving its declared goals. Meanwhile, the Middle East is on the precipice of a full-scale regional war—and it may be that that war has already begun.

Dahlia Scheindlin is a pollster, a policy fellow at Century International, and a columnist at Haaretz. She is the author of the new book, The Crooked Timber of Democracy in Israel. Dalia Dassa Kaye is a senior fellow at the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations and a Fulbright Schuman Visiting Scholar at Lund University.

We discuss the domestic political landscape inside Israel, the risks of further escalation in the region, and whether there is a better path forward.

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview. 

Last fall, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Bob Gates took to the pages of Foreign Affairs to issue a warning: with America facing the most dangerous geopolitical landscape in decades, dysfunction in Washington threatened to turn that danger into disaster.

Today, Russia and China are testing the international order. Iranian proxies are attacking U.S. forces on a daily basis. And, as Gates writes, “at the very moment that events demand a strong and coherent response, America cannot provide one.”

Gates worries that such dysfunction at home could prompt America’s foes to make risky bets—with catastrophic consequences for both the country and the world. 

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview. 

Ukraine may be facing the toughest chapter of its war since the first days of Russia’s invasion. The frontlines have changed little over the past year. And, in November, Ukraine’s top general, Valery Zaluzhny, used the word “stalemate” to describe the situation on the battlefield. In the West, the political tides may be shifting—especially in the United States, where Republicans in Congress are holding up new aid, and Donald Trump, running for reelection, has said he’ll end the war in 24 hours if he returns to the White House. 

Since the war began, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba has been tirelessly and eloquently making a case for Ukrainian victory, both on the world stage and in the pages of Foreign Affairs. In a January 23 conversation with Editor Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, he discussed why the West should not give up on Ukraine, and the country’s prospects of victory in the months and years ahead.

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview. 

There’s a growing sense that Russian President Vladimir Putin is in a pretty good position heading into 2024. Certainly that’s what Putin wants the rest of the world to think—that he can outlast Ukraine and its supporters in the West. Yet the situation looks more complicated on the ground in Russia. 

And there are few people better positioned to make sense of that reality than Andrei Kolesnikov. Kolesnikov, a journalist and senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has been in Moscow since the war began. Over the last two years, he’s written a series of deeply illuminating pieces for Foreign Affairs. In December 2022, the Kremlin listed Kolesnikov as a foreign agent. 

Kolesnikov spoke with Foreign Affairs Senior Editor Hugh Eakin on January 8 about Putin’s hold on power and how Russians view their leader and his disastrous war.

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

Hamas’s attack on October 7 shocked the world and upended the status quo in the Middle East. As Israel’s war in Gaza continues, the two-state solution seems more out of reach than ever. And yet, close observers of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict understand that for there to ever be peace, a political solution must go hand in hand with any military strategy. 

At a Foreign Affairs live event on December 14, Lisa Anderson, Salam Fayyad, and Amos Yadlin joined Foreign Affairs Editor Daniel Kurtz-Phelan to explore these issues and more. 

Anderson is the James T. Shotwell professor of international relations emerita at Columbia University and was the president of The American University in Cairo from 2011 to 2015. Fayyad served as the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority from 2007 to 2013. Yadlin is a retired major general in the Israeli Air Force and served as head of Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate from 2006 to 2010.

Together, they discussed Israeli strategy, whether Hamas can actually be destroyed, and whether there is any hope for a return to a peace process. This is an edited version of their conversation.

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

Most Americans think their country is in decline. So do their leaders. Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump have embraced foreign policies premised on the notion that the global order no longer serves American interests.

But these pessimistic assumptions are wrong, Fareed Zakaria argues in a new essay for Foreign Affairs. Moreover, they are leading the country to embrace strategies that will harm much of the world—and the United States most of all. Zakaria is the host of Fareed Zakaria GPS on CNN, a columnist for The Washington Post, and the author of The Post-American World.

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has a very clear vision for a new world order. And although observers in the United States may disagree with that vision, Washington should not dismiss it, argues Elizabeth Economy in a new piece for Foreign Affairs. 

Economy is one of the foremost experts on China in the United States. A senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, she served as the senior adviser for China at the U.S. Department of Commerce from 2021 to 2023.

She stresses that if the United States wants to out-compete China, Washington needs to offer its own vision for a new world order; it can’t simply defend an unpopular status quo.

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

There is no doubt that China’s economy is struggling. After Chinese President Xi Jinping ended the country’s zero-COVID policy a year ago, most economists expected growth to surge—but that never really happened, and deeper problems became apparent. So what are the exact causes of China’s stagnation? 

The economists Adam Posen, Zongyuan Zoe Liu, and Michael Pettis each have different answers. China’s future—and the future of the United States’ policy toward China—hinges on which of their answers is the right one.

Foreign Affairs Executive Editor Justin Vogt spoke with them at a November 14 discussion co-hosted by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, of which Posen is president. Liu is the Maurice R. Greenberg fellow for China studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Pettis is a senior fellow at the Carnegie China Center and professor of finance at Peking University. 

From killer robots to smarter logistics, artificial intelligence promises to change the way the U.S. military fights and develops weapons. As this new technology comes online, the opportunities are coming into focus—but so are the dangers.

In a new piece for Foreign Affairs, Michèle Flournoy argues the U.S. military has no choice but to move forward with AI and to do so quickly. Flournoy served as the Pentagon’s policy chief during the Obama administration and today is a co-founder and managing partner at the consulting company WestExec Advisors.

Deputy Editor Kate Brannen talked to her about how the U.S. Defense Department will need to change the way it does business if it wants to integrate AI safely and responsibly.

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

There is no end in sight to Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. But even as fighting rages, questions abound about what happens when it finally stops. What can be salvaged from the wreckage? Will Hamas survive, if not as an organization, then as an ideology? Who will govern Gaza? What type of leadership will be needed on both sides to broker any type of lasting peace?

Former Israeli security chief Ami Ayalon says that today there is no clear picture in Israel about what happens on the day after—and that this is a grave mistake. Ayalon began his military service in 1963 and went on to lead Israel’s navy and then Shin Bet, the country’s internal security service.

The task for Israel, he argues, is not just addressing the security failures that preceded October 7, but offering a political future that both Israelis and Palestinians will support.

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

As the war in Gaza continues, the question of Hamas’s future has become paramount. But it has also raised questions about the years of Hamas rule in Gaza—and the group’s support among Palestinians. 

Amaney Jamal is dean of the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and co-founder of Arab Barometer, which conducts public opinion research across the Arab world. 

Her most recent survey of Palestinian public opinion wrapped up on October 6—the eve of Hamas’s attack. As she wrote in a recent piece for Foreign Affairs, “The argument that the entire population of Gaza can be held responsible for Hamas’s actions is quickly discredited when one looks at the facts.”

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

In Ukraine, where war with Russia grinds on, the dominant question has become: can one side outlast the other? This is especially true as both sides face another grueling winter. 

One thing Russia has in ample supply is men. But how it treats its soldiers is having an effect on the battlefield, explains Dara Massicot, who has studied the Russian military for years, first at the U.S. Defense Department and later at RAND and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.  

Foreign Affairs Deputy Editor Kate Brannen sat down with her to discuss how the human dimension of this war provides clues about where it might be headed next. 

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

Two weeks ago, there was reason to think that the Middle East was becoming more stable than it had been for years. Washington was pushing for normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia as one piece of a broader attempt to reduce the U.S. role in the region and focus on other priorities. Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7 shattered those hopes. 

But there had long been signs that all was not well—that key assumptions underlying U.S. strategy were on shaky ground. In the months before the attacks, Suzanne Maloney and Marc Lynch saw the lights flashing red. Maloney is vice president of the Brookings Institution and director of its Foreign Policy program. Lynch is a professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University. As they watched the region over the past several months, both worried that another crisis was coming.

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

In March 2020, as COVID-19 spread across the globe, the Chinese government expelled a handful of U.S. journalists from China. The move came weeks after the Trump administration curtailed the number of Chinese citizens who could work in the United States for state-run Chinese news organizations. Among the journalists forced to leave China was Ian Johnson, who had been living there for 20 years.  

This spring, Johnson finally returned to China. While he was there, he spoke to a cross section of Chinese people—not only scholars and officials but also small business owners, bus drivers, students, and nuns. Some were people he’d known for years. 

What he found was grim—a country in a state of stagnation and turning inward. Its leader, Xi Jinping, seemed so intent on control and so obsessed with security that no price was too high. Yet, under the surface, Johnson found there may be more dissent than most observers realize—a phenomenon he explores in his new book, Sparks: China's Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future.

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

Building closer ties with India has become a top priority for U.S. foreign policy. In June, the White House hosted Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for a lavish state dinner. The thinking is that India will be a key U.S. partner in its competition with China. But is Washington making the wrong assumptions about India? How far do the two countries’ interests diverge when it comes to Beijing?

Ashley Tellis has been one of the closest observers and shapers of the U.S.-Indian relationship. He served in senior positions in the U.S. embassy in New Delhi and on the National Security Council under President George W. Bush. Today, he is the Tata Chair for Strategic Affairs and a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

In an interview earlier this month, Tellis warned that Washington needs to be more clear-eyed about Indian interests—understanding that they do not always align with those of the United States.

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

Ever since the company OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT last year, there have been constant warnings about the effects of artificial intelligence on just about everything. 

Ian Bremmer, the founder of the Eurasia Group, and Mustafa Suleyman, founder of the AI companies DeepMind and Inflection AI, highlight what may be the most significant effect in a new essay for Foreign Affairs. They argue that AI will transform power, including the power balance between states and the companies driving the new technology. Policymakers are already behind the curve, they warn, and if they do not catch up soon, it is possible they never will.

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

After World War II, an idea took hold: economic interdependence between countries would help prevent war. But lately, faith in this idea has wavered, and terms like “decoupling,” “friend shoring,” and “de-risking” are dominating the debates around trade in Washington and beyond. 

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, director general of the World Trade Organization, disagrees with key elements of this new consensus. She thinks that policymakers are misdiagnosing the problems that the world faces, and that they risk setting us on a dangerous course—one that could break the global economy and leave the world both less prosperous and less secure. 

We discuss why views on global trade have changed so dramatically in recent years, China’s integration into the global trading system, and what would happen if the world fragmented into two trading blocs. 

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

In just a few short years, the United States’ China policy has undergone nothing short of a revolution. Few people have been more central to that shift than Matt Pottinger. He was a reporter in China for Reuters and The Wall Street Journal, then a U.S. Marine, deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan. He went on to become the top policymaker on Asia and the deputy national security adviser in the Trump administration. 

Pottinger argues in a new essay for Foreign Affairs that even though Washington’s China strategy has already gotten much tougher, it still has a ways to go—to take on more risk and lay out a clear, if radical, goal for the kind of China the United States wants to see. His views are a window into what China policy might look like if Donald Trump returns to the White House.

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

There’s a near consensus today that U.S. foreign policy has entered a new era. But how to define and navigate this new era is much less clear. 

Richard Fontaine, the CEO of the Center for a New American Security, has held senior positions across the U.S. government—in the Senate, at the State Department and National Security Council, and as an adviser to John McCain, the Republican senator and presidential candidate. There are few people who can offer as informed and comprehensive a view of U.S. foreign policy, especially at a moment when the United States is rethinking its own strategic objectives and sometimes struggling to find new ways of pursuing them.

We discuss the objectives behind the United States’ China policy, democratic backsliding in India, and a potential Republican foreign policy platform. 

Sources:

“Election Interference Demands a Collective Defense” by Richard Fontaine

“The Myth of Neutrality” by Richard Fontaine 

“Washington’s Missing China Strategy” by Richard Fontaine

“The Case Against Foreign Policy Solutionism” by Richard Fontaine

If you have feedback, email us at podcast@foreignaffairs.com. 

The Foreign Affairs Interview is produced by Kate Brannen, Julia Fleming-Dresser, and Molly McAnany; original music by Robin Hilton. Special thanks to Grace Finlayson, Nora Revenaugh, Caitlin Joseph, Asher Ross, Gabrielle Sierra, and Markus Zakaria. 

With the fighting in Ukraine well into its second year, the question of the war’s endgame has become if anything, more complicated. Wagner Chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s short-lived mutiny has raised doubts about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s grip on power. Yet Ukraine’s counteroffensive is not going as well as many had hoped, as Ukrainian forces have yet to make a major breakthrough across heavily defended Russian lines.

In this episode, you can listen to a July 17 conversation with Samuel Charap, Fiona Hill, and Andriy Zagorodnyuk, who joined Foreign Affairs editor Daniel Kurtz-Phelan for a live event. Charap is a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation. Hill is a senior fellow at the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution and the author of There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century. From 2017 to 2019, she was the senior director for Europe and Russia on the U.S. National Security Council. Zagorodnyuk is the former Ukrainian minister of defense and a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council. 

We discuss what’s happening on the battlefield, the state of Putin’s power, and possible endgames to the war.

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin loom over geopolitics in a way that few leaders have in decades. Not even Mao and Stalin drove global events the way Xi and Putin do today. Who they are, how they view the world, and what they want are some of the most important and pressing questions in foreign policy and international affairs. 

Stephen Kotkin and Orville Schell are two of the best scholars to explore these issues. Kotkin is the author of seminal scholarship on Russia, the Soviet Union, and global history, including an acclaimed three-volume biography of Stalin. He is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Kleinheinz Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Schell is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. He is the author of 15 books, ten of them about China. He is also a former professor and dean at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. 

In part two of our conversation, which we taped on June 16, we discussed how the leaders of China and Russia see the West and how that worldview is reshaping geopolitics.

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin loom over geopolitics in a way that few leaders have in decades. Not even Mao and Stalin drove global events the way Xi and Putin do today. Who they are, how they view the world, and what they want are some of the most important and pressing questions in foreign policy and international affairs. 

Stephen Kotkin and Orville Schell are two of the best scholars to explore these issues. Kotkin is the author of seminal scholarship on Russia, the Soviet Union, and global history, including an acclaimed three-volume biography of Stalin. He is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Kleinheinz Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Schell is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. He is the author of 15 books, ten of them about China. He is also a former professor and dean at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. 

In part one of our conversation, we discuss the early lives of Putin and Xi and how history has shaped their worldviews.

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

Ukraine’s counteroffensive is shaping up to be the biggest military operation in Europe since World War II. As Kyiv works to push back Russian troops, there is a lot of focus on how modern technology including drones and satellite Internet terminals is being deployed. But these new advanced systems aside, the battlefield scenes from Ukraine’s frontlines look like they could be from the western front in 1916. 

For the historian Margaret MacMillan, the resonance of World War I goes well beyond the images coming out of Ukraine. As she writes in a new essay for Foreign Affairs, the experience of that earlier great war in Europe “should remind us of the dreadful costs of a prolonged and bitter armed conflict.”

We discuss how leaders decide to stop fighting, the usefulness of historical analogies, and how the end of one war can lay the groundwork for the next. 

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

After the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Paul Kagame was widely seen as a hero—a rebel leader who came to the rescue of his people and helped stop the killing. Over the last 30 years, the Rwandan president has cultivated this vision of himself, and the West has been eager to believe it. 

But for Michela Wrong, a journalist who has covered Africa for decades, cracks in this story became too big to ignore. In her most recent book, Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad, she investigates the 2014 political murder of a former Rwandan spy chief who fled the country after a falling out with Kagame. Her reporting uncovered the true nature of Kagame’s regime, painting a picture of a dictator who will stop at nothing to silence his critics. Now, in a piece for Foreign Affairs, Wrong reports on Kagame’s meddling in eastern Congo and how his support for the M23 rebel group is risking a broader regional conflict.

We discuss her reporting on Kagame, how Rwanda is working to destabilize central Africa today, and why the West is doing so little to stop it.

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

This week, a top Chinese envoy is traveling across Europe, making stops in Ukraine and Russia. Beijing says that the purpose of the trip is to discuss a “political settlement” to the war. But this diplomatic push raises bigger questions not just about China’s attempt to position itself as a peacemaker but also about the growing closeness of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Bonny Lin is a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. She previously served in the Pentagon, including as country director for China. Alexander Gabuev is the director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, based in Berlin, where he moved after leaving Moscow at the start of the war. 

We discuss the relationship between Putin and Xi, how China has responded to the war in Ukraine, and whether China might provide Russia with lethal aid.

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

Russia’s war in Ukraine has drawn Western allies closer together, but it has not unified the world’s democracies in the way U.S. President Joe Biden might have hoped for when the war began last February. Instead, the last year has highlighted just how differently much of the rest of the world sees not only the war but also the broader global landscape. 

In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, policymakers and scholars from Africa, Latin America, and South and Southeast Asia explored the dangers, as well as the new opportunities, that the war and the broader return of great-power conflict present for their countries and regions.

In this episode, you can listen to a May 4 conversation between Tim Murithi, Nirupama Rao, Matias Spektor, and Executive Editor Justin Vogt that was part of the Foreign Affairs’ event series. They discuss the issues most important to their regions, the mounting costs of the Ukraine war, and the impact of sharpening geopolitical tensions.

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

As the Biden administration continues to provide massive amounts of military and economic support to Ukraine, it also has its eyes on China. What will it take to deter Beijing from attempting to seize Taiwan someday? What is the best strategy to avoid a great-power conflict? How can the United States maintain its technological edge on the battlefield? 

These are the questions that occupy the Pentagon’s leadership, including U.S. Army General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Before becoming chairman, the president’s top military adviser, he served as chief of staff of the U.S. Army. He has deployed all over the world, including multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

We discuss the battlefield dynamics in Ukraine, how concern over escalation has shaped Western support for Kyiv, and how the United States can avoid a great-power war in the future. 

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

There seems to be an unstoppable march toward the automation of work, including the checkout at the supermarket, the seemingly limitless possibilities of ChatGPT, and so much else. What is driving this push toward automation? For one, labor scarcity in developed countries.

But Lant Pritchett, a development economist, argues in a new piece for Foreign Affairs that instead of choosing machines over people and funneling resources into job-killing technologies, countries should work to let people move to where they are needed. Pritchett is the research director of Labor Mobility Partnerships, the RISE research director at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford, and a former World Bank economist.

We discuss why automation is a policy choice rather than an inevitable force and how it is contributing to poverty levels across the globe.

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

The stakes of a second Trump term are very clear to Ben Rhodes, who served for eight years as one of Barack Obama’s closest advisers on national security. “Trump’s blend of strongman nationalism and isolationism could create a permission structure for aggression,” Rhodes writes in a new piece for Foreign Affairs. 

Today, Rhodes is a co-host of the podcast Pod Save the World and the author of After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made. From 2009 to 2017, he served as U.S. deputy national security adviser for strategic communications and speechwriting in the Obama administration.

Rhodes is as clear-eyed about the achievements and failures of President Joe Biden’s foreign policy. If Biden does win a second term, Rhodes argues, he should set out a new strategy—one that takes the world as it is, not as Washington wishes it would be.

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

Even for an autocrat like Russian President Vladimir Putin, waging war depends on the acceptance—if not the support—of his people. Despite the disastrous start to his invasion of Ukraine, and with Moscow facing battlefield losses and mounting casualties, Russian approval of the war remains remarkably high.

Maria Lipman, a Russian journalist and political scientist who fled her country when the war began, explains why Russian support for the war remains so strong—and what Putin is doing to keep it that way. He “has used the war to clamp down on Russian society, to pull elites even closer to him, and to shore up his domestic position,” Lipman writes in a January essay with Michael Kimmage.  

We discuss the strength of Putin’s regime, how the war in Ukraine has shaped Putin’s relationship with the Russian people, and what outcomes of the war the Russian public would possibly accept.

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

The 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq has prompted a wave of reflection on the war: how and why it began, where it went wrong, and how it continues to haunt the Middle East and burden American leadership.

In a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, “What the Neocons Got Wrong,” Max Boot does some of this painful reflection. In 2003, Boot was a prominent neoconservative voice making the case for war. Today, Boot is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of several books, including The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam and The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right. 

In a conversation with Foreign Affairs Executive Editor Justin Vogt, he looks back with regret at the flawed assumptions that shaped his thinking—and considers the troubling lessons for American foreign policy today.

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

American politics and foreign policy have become consumed with the challenge from China, and the face of that challenge is Xi Jinping. But many depictions of Xi are stark black and white, portraying Xi as either an all-powerful mastermind carrying out a long-term plot for Chinese domination—or as a leader guilty of self-defeating overreach that has sent China into decline.

For Christopher Johnson, who worked for two decades as a China analyst at the CIA, the truth is in the messy middle. Today, Johnson is president and CEO of China Strategies Group and a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis. He argues that a better U.S.-China policy requires a more nuanced understanding of Xi and his power.

We discuss what the spy balloon incident revealed about the U.S.-Chinese relationship, how Xi has fared since suddenly lifting China’s strict COVID-19 lockdown measures in the fall, and why Washington seems gripped by “Taiwan invasion hysteria.”

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

When Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his war in Ukraine on February 24, 2022, he thought his military would quickly take Kyiv and bring down the government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. That the war has lasted this long is evidence of how wrong Putin was and how much the world underestimated the strength of Ukrainian resistance.

Although Ukraine has heroically defended itself, the conflict has taken an enormous toll. Ukrainian towns have been destroyed, thousands of civilians have died, and the trauma of war crimes haunts survivors. The consequences of Putin’s decision to invade have stretched far beyond Ukraine’s borders, too. The war has disrupted global food and energy markets. It has strengthened some alliances while straining others. A year later, the world is still debating what is at stake in Ukraine—and what it will take to bring this war to an end.  

Foreign Affairs Editor Daniel Kurtz-Phelan spoke with Liana Fix, Michael Kimmage, and Dara Massicot on February 24, 2023, for a special event marking the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

There may be no better example of how domestic dysfunction can hobble global power than the United Kingdom in recent years. Constant political and economic turmoil has reinforced the sense that this once great power is in terminal decline. Brexit, the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the EU in 2016, put the United Kingdom as a whole at odds with Scotland and Northern Ireland, where large majorities voted to stay in Europe. Although Brexit is clearly to blame for many of the United Kingdom’s recent problems, the forces undermining the country’s stability started taking shape long ago.

In a new piece for Foreign Affairs, Irish writer Fintan O’Toole argues that English nationalism, which “was previously buried under British and imperial identities,” is one of the driving forces pulling the United Kingdom apart. Today, the country is “unsure about not just its place in the international order but also whether it can continue to be regarded as a single place.”

We discuss how Brexit continues to haunt British politics, the future of the Scottish independence movement, and how national identity is formed and expressed.

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

Last week, a Chinese surveillance balloon floating over the United States set off a political firestorm in Washington. It also offered a glimpse into the secret world of intelligence gathering, where countries are racing to harness new technologies that will help them gain a competitive edge. But these same new technologies are making spycraft, especially the collection of human intelligence, far more challenging. 

To adapt to these changes, Amy Zegart, a Stanford professor and the author of the book "Spies, Lies, and Algorithms," believes the U.S. government should overhaul the way the intelligence community is organized. In a new essay for Foreign Affairs, she argues that a new intelligence agency dedicated to open-source intelligence is needed if the United States is going to keep up. If not, she writes, “a culture of secrecy will continue to strangle the adoption of cutting-edge technical tools from the commercial sector.” 

We discuss how human intelligence collection is becoming more dangerous, what the war in Ukraine has revealed about the intelligence world, and the risks and opportunities of open-source intelligence.

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

To hear Western leaders tell it, the outcome of Russia’s war in Ukraine will determine whether the international rules-based order survives. If Russian President Vladimir Putin wins in Ukraine, the laws and norms that are supposed to protect sovereignty will be exposed as useless. But what if that order is already broken, and there is no going back? The international system’s response to recent transnational challenges—whether it’s climate change, conflict, the pandemic, or the global debt crisis—has been deeply inadequate, especially for the “global South.” Much of the world can see that the stakes are high in Ukraine, especially for European security—but does not share the view that the outcome will fundamentally change how the world is governed.

In recent essays for Foreign Affairs, Shivshankar Menon, who served as national security adviser to Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh from 2010 to 2014, explores the failures of the current world order and examines what could replace it. He has also served as India’s foreign secretary and as the country’s ambassador to Israel, Sri Lanka, China, and Pakistan. He is the author of India and Asian Geopolitics: The Past, Present.

We discuss what’s at stake in Ukraine, India’s place in a changing world, and what order could emerge from today’s great-power competition.

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

Russia’s mythmaking—about its place in the world and the role Ukraine plays in its history—has made the world a more dangerous place. Russian President Vladimir Putin is the chief storyteller—and his version of events has even warped American thinking about Ukraine. Why didn’t the West react more forcefully in 2014, when Russia first violently took Ukrainian territory? Why is Ukraine’s post-Soviet history so different from Russia’s? And what can Ukrainians teach Americans about democracy? 

Timothy Snyder is an expert on Ukrainian history and began warning about the dangers Russia poses long before Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine last February. He is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University and the author of several books, including Bloodlands, On Tyranny, and The Road to Unfreedom. In September, Snyder traveled to Ukraine and met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

We discuss what’s at stake in Ukraine, what a Ukrainian victory might look like, and why using the word “stalemate” to describe the war is misguided.

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

In recent years, many of the key assumptions and ideas that guided economic policy for decades have fallen apart. Globalization pushed jobs overseas—and when those jobs were not replaced, the dislocation people felt gave rise to new political movements in the United States and beyond. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and it laid bare how vulnerable global supply chains had become. While it is clear that the old system of neoliberal economic thinking is no longer working, it is far from certain what new ideas will replace the old paradigms.

Rana Foroohar is a business columnist and an associate editor at the Financial Times. She has covered trade and economic policy for years, and in an essay for Foreign Affairs—and a new book, titled Homecoming—she steps back to explain what went wrong and how the fallout is shaping global politics today.

We discuss the failure of neoliberal policies, the importance of manufacturing, and the recent crypto collapse.

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

Editor’s Note: On July 16, 2024, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York unsealed an indictment alleging that Sue Mi Terry had acted as an unregistered agent of the South Korean government. Foreign Affairs requires all contributors to disclose any affiliation or activity that could present a genuine or perceived conflict of interest or call into question the integrity of their work. We take these allegations very seriously.

The question of what to do about North Korea and its nuclear weapons program has fallen off Washington’s radar. But while the West is preoccupied with the war in Ukraine, competition with China, instability in Iran, and a long list of other foreign policy challenges, Kim Jong Un continues to develop his country’s nuclear capabilities, with a possible seventh nuclear test in the works. What should the Biden administration be doing to prevent this crisis from spinning out of control? 

Sue Mi Terry, a former senior CIA analyst and an official on the National Security Council under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, says it is high time for the administration to get more engaged and better articulate its policy approach—especially as support for a domestic nuclear program intensifies in South Korea. 

We discuss North Korea’s recent weapons-testing spree, whether denuclearization is still a worthy U.S. foreign policy goal, and the stability of Kim’s regime.

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

Earlier this month, Claudia Sheinbaum won a sweeping victory in Mexico’s presidential election. Although a lot of the coverage framed the results as a win for women and progressive politics, the story is far more complicated. 

Mexico’s democracy is in trouble, warns Denise Dresser, a political analyst in Mexico. For years, Dresser has watched Sheinbaum’s party—and its previous leader, Andrés Manuel López Obrador—govern through polarization and the erosion of democratic institutions, even as the country struggles with violence, corruption, and persistent inequality. Dresser is a professor of political science at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico.

There is a chance Sheinbaum charts a different course. But if not, Dresser worries that Mexico could face an autocratic future. 

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

Russia has suffered major setbacks on the battlefield in Ukraine, its economy is battered by Western sanctions, and its diplomatic clout has suffered due to President Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion. It is fair to say that Russia is militarily, economically, and geopolitically weaker than it was a year ago—and policymakers in Washington and Europe may be tempted to downgrade the Russian threat as a result. 

But dismissing Russia would be a mistake, argue Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Michael Kofman in the November/December issue of Foreign Affairs. “Russian power and influence may be diminished, but that does not mean Russia will become dramatically less threatening,” they write. “Instead, some aspects of the threat are likely to worsen.” 

In this episode, Kendall-Taylor and Kofman speak with Deputy Editor Kate Brannen as part of Foreign Affairs’ event series. We discuss the state of Russian power, Ukraine’s recent battlefield wins, and how this war might end. 

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

Protests have rocked Iran for nine weeks, despite a violent crackdown by the country’s security services. The demonstrations erupted in mid-September after Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman, was detained by the morality police in Tehran for allegedly not wearing her hijab properly. She was reportedly beaten, fell into a coma, and died days later. The public responded to her death with grief and outrage, and over the last several weeks the protests have evolved into a much broader movement against the country’s leaders. As Iran’s regime grapples with these internal threats to its power, it is sending weapons to Russia to use in Ukraine and continuing to wield its influence around the Middle East.

Earlier this year, Karim Sadjadpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, argued in Foreign Affairs that Iran’s foreign exploits were coming at great cost at home. “Ultimately,” he wrote, “the Islamic Republic’s grand strategy will be defeated not by the United States or Israel but by the people of Iran, who have paid the highest price for it.”

We discuss whether Iran’s regime will survive this wave of protests, whether reform is possible, and the nature of Iran’s relationship with Russia and China.

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

Boris Bondarev worked as a Russian diplomat for 20 years. On the morning of February 24, when the Russian military started bombing Ukraine, he decided to step down from his post at Russia's permanent mission at the UN in Geneva. After getting his family to safety, he publicly resigned in May, making it clear he was leaving his job in protest of the war. 

In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, he writes about his reasons for publicly resigning—and what he learned after years of watching President Vladimir Putin’s regime up close. “The invasion of Ukraine made it impossible to deny just how brutal and repressive Russia had become,” he writes. 

In this episode, Foreign Affairs Deputy Editor Kate Brannen talks to Bondarev about the Russian military’s vulnerabilities, how his family reacted to his decision to leave, and what happens to Russia after Putin.

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

The past six months have marked an especially rocky chapter in the U.S.-Chinese relationship. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s zero-COVID policy has made it difficult to travel around the country and has largely kept foreigners away. In August, Beijing cut off key channels of communication with Washington in response to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. In the months since Moscow launched its invasion of Ukraine, China has not condemned Russia’s unprovoked assault, nor has it publicly moved away from its “no limits” partnership with the Kremlin. More recently, new trade restrictions from the Biden administration have dealt a serious blow to the Chinese semiconductor industry. All in all, it has been a tense and unusual time in this fragile but immensely important relationship. 

As the United States’ top diplomat to China, Ambassador Nick Burns has had to navigate the challenges of the last few months, strongly pushing back on China where the Biden administration disagrees with Beijing but also trying to find opportunities where communication, and even cooperation, is possible. He brings enormous experience to the job. Burns previously served at the State Department as undersecretary for political affairs, as ambassador to NATO and to Greece, and as State Department spokesperson. He has also worked on the National Security Council staff on Soviet and Russian affairs. 

We discuss the challenges facing China, how China views American power, and what it’s like to represent the United States in Beijing today.

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.