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. 

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.