The Foreign Affairs Interview

February 24 marks the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. After Moscow’s initial onslaught, Ukrainian counteroffensives, and slow Russian gains since, the war has settled into a brutal pattern of attrition, adaptation, and endurance. Ukrainian cities are rationing electricity, as the Ukrainian military struggles to muster the manpower and munitions needed to gain a decisive edge. Meanwhile, the battlefield has become a hellscape of drones and artillery fire—with no clear breakthrough for either side in sight. Michael Kofman has been one of the sharpest observers and analysts of the changing nature of the war, from Russia’s troop buildup in late 2021 to the present, in the pages of Foreign Affairs and elsewhere. He has also considered the geopolitical implications of each new phase of fighting—what the continued threat of a belligerent Russia means for the West, and how Ukraine’s allies can prepare it for sustained conflict. Now, as the war enters its fifth year, Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, argues that “Russia retains battlefield advantages, but they have not proved decisive, and more and more, time is working against Moscow.” “Yet ending the conflict on terms acceptable to Ukraine,” he writes, “will not be an easy feat, either.” In this special bonus episode, Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke with Kofman on Wednesday, February 18 about where the war stands four years in, and how it might change in the weeks and months ahead. You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

A year into Donald Trump’s second term, the United States’ allies on both sides of the Atlantic seem to have recognized that they need a new strategy for this age of rupture, as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney called it. Trump’s grab for Greenland, his tit-for-tat tariffs on Canada, his approach in Ukraine—all have opened up rifts between the United States and many of its closest partners. Chrystia Freeland has for years been on the frontlines of the battle for the future of the alliance as Canada’s foreign minister, deputy prime minister, and finance minister—roles in which she went head-to-head with the Trump administration on a host of fraught issues. She recently left the Canadian government to serve as a volunteer adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.  As much as Freeland sees the cracks in the relationship, she still stresses the imperative of making the alliance work despite them. Freeland and Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference on February 15 about how to negotiate with Trump, what Ukraine can offer Europe and the United States, and why American allies must rethink their approach to this moment.  You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

In 2024, there were more than 300 million migrants across the world—double the number there were in 1990. Many of those had been displaced by conflict or climate change; many were simply looking for jobs and a better life. But the national and multilateral systems designed to manage these flows have proved grossly inadequate, helping set off political convulsions not just in the United States and Europe but in countries around the world, including in Africa, Latin America, and South Asia. In democracies, migration has perhaps become today’s most fraught and divisive political issue. To Amy Pope, the director general of the International Organization for Migration, these “unprecedented levels” of migration and the crackdowns that have come in reaction make abundantly clear that the current global immigration system is failing. It is, she wrote in Foreign Affairs last year, “incapable of contending with today’s humanitarian needs, demographic trends, or labor-market demands.”  Pope argues that a challenge of this scale demands a complete system overhaul—a rebuilding of global migration policy that prioritizes order and dignity. Without such a restructuring, Pope warns, the risks of “more social unrest, more inequality,” and, ultimately, “more abuse and exploitation” of the world’s most vulnerable people will only grow. You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney may have made headlines when he described a “rupture” in global order in a speech at Davos last month. But long before that, policymakers and analysts had already been grappling with this unsettled—and unsettling—era in global politics. And the challenge has of course been especially great for American allies facing a very different Washington.    President Alexander Stubb of Finland has become central both to navigating and to understanding this time of rupture. He has emerged as a leader who is particularly adept at managing the rift in the U.S.-European relationship, and at talking to Donald Trump, whether about Greenland or about golf. Yet even as he’s scrambled seemingly every week to avert a transatlantic crisis, Stubb has also gone out of his way to stress the long-term stakes of this moment—as he did in a recent Foreign Affairs essay. He warns that without significant changes, “the multilateral system as it exists will crumble,” and that “the alternatives are much worse: spheres of influence, chaos, and disorder.”   Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke to Stubb on Tuesday, February 3 about geopolitical challenges from China and Russia to Ukraine and, of course, Greenland; about Trump and the future of alliances; and about what a true breakdown in global order would mean in the years ahead.  You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

One of the big surprises of Donald Trump’s second term has been the change in his approach to China. His first term marked the start of what seemed to be a hard-line consensus in Washington. But in the past year, the drivers of Trump’s policy have been much harder to decipher—including for Chinese policymakers. Beijing was prepared to respond forcefully to tough U.S. measures, as it has, most prominently, by wielding its control over rare-earth metals. Yet it has also seen new opportunities to gain ground in its bid for global leadership, as Trump’s focus careens from Latin America to the Middle East to Greenland. Jonathan Czin has spent his career decoding the power struggles and ideological debates inside the halls of power in Beijing. Now at the Brookings Institution, Czin long served as a top China analyst at the CIA before becoming director for China at the National Security Council. He sees Beijing’s year of aggressive diplomacy as a success, but with a lot of uncertainty about the months ahead. Xi Jinping faces a series of summits with Trump even as he grapples with economic challenges at home and a military that, if recent purges are any indication, is still not to his liking. Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke with Czin about China’s approach to Trump 2.0; what to make of the military purges and other developments in Beijing; and the enduring nature of U.S.-Chinese rivalry, whatever the surprises in the short term. You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

In the past year, Donald Trump has upended the global trading system and used American economic power like no president in recent memory. He’s imposed tariffs to force other countries to fall into line on commercial issues and geopolitical disputes—like this week’s threats against NATO partners over Greenland. He’s called into question the role of the dollar. And at home, he’s attacked the independence of the Federal Reserve and intervened in private-sector decision-making. Lael Brainard served as director of the National Economic Council in the Biden administration and, before that, as vice chair of the Federal Reserve. Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke to her not about the short-term consequences of Trump’s policies but about what they would mean for U.S. power and prosperity in the long term. Brainard has taken on that question in recent pieces for Foreign Affairs. In this conversation, she stressed not just the risks posed by Trump’s economic agenda but the bigger changes necessary to sustain American economic success into the future. You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

At the end of December, protests erupted across Iran. The government has since cracked down hard with potentially thousands of Iranians killed. It now seems possible that the United States might intervene. Via social media, U.S. President Donald Trump has told Iranian protesters that “help is on the way.” We do not know yet what, if anything, Washington will do. But the repressive regime of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is being pushed to the brink after punishing years of war and sanctions.  Few observers of Iranian politics have thought more deeply about the regime and its future than Karim Sadjadpour. He is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. And he is the author of a recent essay in Foreign Affairs in which he underlines the fragility of the Ayatollah’s regime and explores what might happen after its fall.  Deputy Editor Kanishk Tharoor spoke to Sadjadpour on the morning of January 12 about the upheaval in Iran, the weakness and brutality of the regime, what U.S. intervention can and cannot achieve, and about what kind of political order might emerge in the coming years.  You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

It was just a few days ago that, after months of saber-rattling by the Trump administration, U.S. forces raided Venezuela and captured its leader, Nicolás Maduro. Already, Trump has suggested that the United States could “run” the country and has demanded a huge stake in Venezuela’s vast oil resources. Maduro, meanwhile, sits in a New York jail, awaiting his next court date in March. But much remains unclear—about what happens in Venezuela with Maduro gone but his regime largely still in place; how his ouster affects the wider region; and what’s next as the Trump administration flexes its muscles in Latin America. In this special two-part episode, Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke on the morning of Wednesday, January 7, with two experts on Venezuela seeking to make sense of the situation. First, Phil Gunson, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group who is based in Caracas, explores the dynamics within Venezuela and the prospects for the country’s new president, Delcy Rodríguez. Then, Juan S. Gonzalez, a longtime U.S. policymaker, including a recent stretch overseeing Latin America on the National Security Council, charts the history and near future of U.S. policy on Venezuela. Both make clear how difficult and dangerous the path ahead will be, for Venezuela and for the United States. You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

The biggest questions in U.S. foreign policy today tend to be about China. Policymakers and analysts argue over the implications of China’s rise, the extent of its ambitions, the nature of its economic influence, and the meaning of its growing military strength. Underlying these arguments is a widespread sense that where Beijing once seemed likely to slot comfortably into a U.S.-led international order, it now poses a profound challenge to American interests. No one brings more perspective to these arguments than the historian Odd Arne Westad. In a series of essays in Foreign Affairs over the past few years, Westad has explored the drivers of China’s foreign policy, its approach to global power, and its fraught ties with the United States. He sees in the long arc of Chinese and global history a stark warning about the potential for conflict, including a war between China and the United States. But Westad also sees in this history lessons for policymakers today about how to avert such an outcome. Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke to Westad about China’s complicated past, about how that history is defining its role as a great power, and about the paths both to war and to peace in the years ahead.   You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

The world has reached various inflection points, or so we are often told. Advanced technology, such as artificial intelligence, promises to transform our way of life. In geopolitics, the growing competition between China and the United States heralds an uncertain new era. And within many democracies, the old assumptions that undergirded politics are in doubt; liberalism appears to be in disarray and illiberal forces on the rise.  Few scholars are grappling with the many dimensions of the current moment quite like Daron Acemoglu is. “The world is in the throes of a pervasive crisis,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs in 2023, a crisis characterized by widening economic inequalities and a breakdown in public trust. Acemoglu is a Nobel Prize–winning economist, but his research and writing has long strayed beyond the conventional bounds of his discipline. He has written famously, in the bestselling book Why Nations Fail, about how institutions determine the success of countries. He has explored how technological advances have transformed—or indeed failed to transform—societies. And more recently he has turned his attention to the crisis facing liberal democracy, one accentuated by economic alienation and the threat of technological change. Deputy Editor Kanishk Tharoor spoke with Acemoglu about a stormy world of overlapping crises and about how the ship of liberal democracy might be steered back on course. You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

Last week, the Trump administration released its National Security Strategy. Such documents are usually fairly staid exercises in lofty rhetoric. Not this one. It harshly rebukes the strategies of prior administrations, highlighting what Trump’s team sees as the failures of traditional foreign policy elites. It pointedly criticizes Washington’s traditional allies in Europe and fixates on security issues in the Western Hemisphere, but it has little to say about American rivals such as China and Russia. In recent weeks, the administration has provided a demonstration of what its strategy looks like in practice, launching controversial strikes against boats allegedly trafficking drugs in the Caribbean and mulling military intervention in Venezuela, while also putting the trade war with China on hold and pushing for a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine. To Kori Schake, this approach represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the means and ends of American power. Now a senior fellow and director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, Schake served on the National Security Council and in the State Department in the George W. Bush administration, and she has become one of Trump’s sharpest critics. What she sees from the administration is “solipsism masquerading as strategy,” as she put it in her most recent piece for Foreign Affairs. Schake argues that the administration’s actions—and the worldview undergirding them—are based on “faulty assumptions” with potentially dire consequences: a United States hostile to its longtime allies, a brewing civil-military crisis at home, and a world order that could leave Washington behind.  You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

In the last decade, American foreign policymakers have been forced to reckon with a shifting global balance of power. Theorists have long argued over the shape of international order. But such questions now occupy practitioners, as well, as they grapple with the end of the unipolar moment that followed the Cold War and struggle to shape new strategies that account for new geopolitical realities. Emma Ashford is a leading proponent of a more restrained U.S. foreign policy. In an essay for Foreign Affairs, as well as in her new book First Among Equals, she argues that American policymakers must, above all, get comfortable with the fact of a multipolar world. “Instead of artificially cleaving the world in two,” she writes, “the United States should choose to embrace multipolarity and craft strategy accordingly.”  Ashford joined Dan Kurtz-Phelan on Monday, November 17, to discuss this new order, how the Biden and Trump administrations have dealt with these changes, and how the United States must adapt to thrive in a multipolar age. You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

In the last few years, artificial intelligence has become a central focus of geopolitical competition, and especially of U.S.-Chinese rivalry. For much of that time, the United States, or at least U.S. companies, seemed to have the advantage. But Ben Buchanan, a leading scholar of technology who crafted the Biden administration’s AI strategy, worries that the United States’ AI superiority isn’t nearly as assured as many have assumed. In an essay in the November/December issue of Foreign Affairs, Buchanan, writing with Tantum Collins, warns that “the American way of developing AI is reaching its limits,” and as those limits become clear, “they will start to erode—and perhaps even end—U.S. dominance.” The essay calls for a new grand bargain between tech and the U.S. government—a bargain necessary to advancing American AI and to ensuring that it enhances, rather than undermines, U.S. national security. Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke to Buchanan about the future of AI competition and how it could reshape not just American power but global order itself. You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview. 

Members of the foreign policy world have talked a lot about great-power competition over the last decade. But no one can entirely agree on the contours of today’s competition. Whether it’s a battle of autocracies and democracies. Or revisionists and status quo powers. Or whether, as the realists would argue, it’s just states doing what states do.  S. C. M. Paine, a longtime professor of strategy and policy at the U.S. Naval War College, sees something else going on. To her, the great-power competition we talk about today is just the latest example of the centuries-old tension between maritime and continental powers. For maritime powers—such as, for most of its history, the United States—money and trade serve as the basis of influence. And that leads them to promote rules and order. Continental powers—such as Russia most clearly and China in most but not all ways—focus their security objectives on territory, which they seek to defend, and control, and expand. From this divide rises two very different visions of global order. It also, Paine argues in a new essay in Foreign Affairs, explains the basic drivers of today’s great-power competition. But as she looks at more recent developments, Paine lays out an additional concern. The United States has long been an exemplar of maritime power. But it is starting to behave in ways that suggest a shift away from the maritime strategies that have served it so well. Paine’s focus on the contest between land and sea makes clear the stakes of that shift. You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview. 

Robert O’Brien served as Donald Trump’s national security adviser from 2019 to 2021. O’Brien’s predecessors in that position left the administration to become some of the most vociferous critics of their former boss. O’Brien, in contrast, remained a staunch defender of Trump’s foreign policy through the Biden administration and into Trump’s second term. And perhaps as a result, he can help make some sense of the thinking behind Trump’s approach on key national security issues, drawing out the objectives and assumptions driving policy on China, Ukraine, the Middle East, Venezuela, and much else. Shortly before the 2024 election, O’Brien wrote an essay in Foreign Affairs called “The Return of Peace Through Strength: Making the Case for Trump’s Foreign Policy.” Last week, he published a follow-up to that essay, giving Trump high marks for his approach to the world over the past ten months. O’Brien and Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke on Monday, November 10, about the second-term policy so far, about where he sees continuity and where he sees change from the first term, and about where Trump’s foreign policy may be going from here. You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

Last week’s meeting between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping may have brought a respite in the trade war. But it hardly touched the more fundamental drivers of U.S.-Chinese rivalry, a rivalry that has come to shape more and more dimensions of geopolitics, the global economy, and beyond. Few have spent as much time observing and chronicling the interactions between Washington and Beijing as Orville Schell. Schell, one of America’s foremost China hands and the author of too many books on China to name, has been in the room for encounters between a slew of American presidents and Chinese leaders. He has also, for decades, interpreted the bitter factional struggles and geopolitical jockeying of the Chinese Communist Party. And as Xi’s attempt to remake the Chinese state continues, Schell has mined China’s history and its present for insight—into how the country thinks of its place in the world, and into the unresolved contradictions that continue to roil the party. “Peek behind the veil,” Schell writes in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, “and a different reality reveals itself: a dog-eat-dog world of power struggles, artifice, hubris, treachery, and duplicity—yet also an enormous amount of sacrifice.” Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke with Schell on Tuesday, November 4, about Trump and Xi, about the state of the United States’ China policy, and about both the past and future of China itself. You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

If one thing can be said to characterize the first months of Donald Trump’s second term, it is his expansive and often norm-breaking use of presidential power, both abroad and at home. There are the lethal strikes on boats alleged to be smuggling drugs; the range of tariffs he’s imposed; the way he’s gone after enemies, withheld funds, and restructured the federal workforce; the list could go on. Trump has disregarded constraint after constraint on the power of the executive, and many of the forces expected to check that power—in the courts, in Congress, in the private sector or media—have shown little ability or willingness to do so. In the early weeks of Trump’s second term, Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar wrote an essay in Foreign Affairs called “How to Survive a Constitutional Crisis.” Cuéllar, a former justice on the California Supreme Court who now serves as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, looked at Trump’s early moves and tried to lay out a framework for understanding which of them represented just radical shifts in policy, and which of them posed a threat to the very foundations of the American system. Cuéllar believes that the country’s courts, its system of federalism, and its independent media can still provide meaningful checks on presidential power. But time is of the essence, he warns, before these pillars of American democracy could start to crack. You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview. 

With a cease-fire in place in Gaza after two years of war, Donald Trump has proclaimed the arrival of peace in the Middle East. At the moment, however, it’s not even clear if the cease-fire itself will hold, let alone whether there’s a viable path to a long-term solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Few are more familiar with the elusiveness of peace in that conflict than Robert Malley. He has served as a senior Middle East official in American administrations going back to the 1990s. He has sat across from Israeli and Palestinian leaders at moments of great optimism and, more often, greater disappointment. And in a recent piece for Foreign Affairs, drawing on a new book co-authored with Hussein Agha, Malley argues that the cause of that disappointment is Washington’s dogged insistence on a two-state solution that neither Israelis nor Palestinians really want. Years of folly, Malley and Agha argue, have seen the United States claim “success even as its efforts yielded serial disaster.”  Malley offers a harsh indictment of decades of U.S. Middle East policy—a policy that, in his assessment, has done more to destabilize and inflame the region than contribute to a lasting peace. Editor Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke with him about America’s record in the Middle East, the devastation of the war in Gaza, and what could perhaps rise from the wreckage. You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview. 

The world has watched as a cease-fire has tentatively taken effect in Gaza. All the surviving Israeli hostages are home and many Palestinian prisoners and detainees have been released. Israeli forces have pulled back within Gaza, and much-needed humanitarian aid is rushing in. Phase One of Donald Trump’s 20-point plan seems to be working. But what happens next is more uncertain. At the time of this recording, conditions on the ground were still in flux, as the difficulty of Phase Two came into focus. The thornier details of who will govern Gaza and provide security there remain to be determined. Nor is it clear whether Hamas will actually disarm, as Trump’s plan calls the group to do. Most of Gaza is in ruins and many Palestinians fear that the cease-fire will only be a pause before a resumption of the conflict.   Shira Efron, Khaled Elgindy, and Daniel Shapiro have closely analyzed the war and its regional and global implications for Foreign Affairs over the last two years. All three are intimately familiar with the challenges of making peace in the Middle East: Efron, the distinguished chair for Israel Policy at the RAND Corporation, has advised Israeli security officials. Elgindy, a visiting scholar at Georgetown University, counseled Palestinian negotiators from 2004 to 2009. And Shapiro, a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council, served as U.S. ambassador to Israel during the Obama administration and as deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East during the Biden administration. Executive Editor Justin Vogt spoke with Efron, Elgindy, and Shapiro on the afternoon of Tuesday, October 14, to make sense of Trump’s deal and the Gaza cease-fire—its promise, its fragility, and its potential pitfalls. You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

Ever since Russia started its war in Ukraine, assessments of its military power have vacillated wildly. First, Russian forces were supposed to overrun Ukraine and crush any resistance in a matter of days. Then, they were thought to be so weak that a Ukrainian counteroffensive or a new capability might cause them to collapse altogether. Now, with the war in its fourth year, and Donald Trump’s return to office bringing uncertainty about Western support, it has started to seem once again that time might be on Moscow’s side. Dara Massicot argues in Foreign Affairs that none of these images reflects reality. Since the invasion began, Massicot, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has been analyzing the state of Russia’s military—its failure and its surprising resiliency. But what has struck Massicot more recently, and what she thinks many observers are missing, is the extent to which Russia has managed to learn and adapt—in Ukraine and beyond. She warns in a new piece for Foreign Affairs that “the Russian military will emerge from its invasion with extensive experience and a distinct vision of the future of combat”—experience it is already sharing with China, Iran, and North Korea. The United States and Europe should pay close attention. Because if they do not take it upon themselves to “study Russia’s studying,” as Massicot puts it, she worries that they risk not just losing Ukraine but also falling behind in the next global crisis. You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.