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.

When Xi Jinping took over the Chinese Communist Party in 2012, he began a new chapter in China’s history—one that would come to be defined above all by his grip on power. Xi overhauled not only the CCP but also China’s economy, military, and role in the world. Yet no matter how secure his power may be—and no matter his recent hot-mic musings about living to 150—what comes after Xi, and how it comes, is an increasingly central question in Chinese politics.

As the political scientists Tyler Jost and Daniel Mattingly wrote recently in Foreign Affairs, “For any authoritarian regime, political succession is a moment of peril . . . and for all its strengths, the CCP is no exception.” And that’s not just a risk for the future. The uncertainty and the jockeying that the succession question spurs is already starting to shape China’s present.

To Jost and Mattingly, there’s more at stake than just the matter of who will follow Xi. They note: “The drama created by a struggle over the succession . . . is unlikely to stay inside China’s borders.” They joined Deputy Editor Chloe Fox to discuss the nature of Xi’s rule, his attempt to define his legacy, and what that will mean for China in the coming months, years, and decades.

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