The Foreign Affairs Interview

Earlier this week, Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris in the U.S. presidential election, ushering in a new era of uncertainty at home and abroad.

In a special bonus episode, Foreign Affairs Editor Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke with Daniel Drezner and Kori Schake on Wednesday, November 6, about what the world might expect from a second Trump term—on everything from wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, to China and alliances, to trade and immigration.

Daniel Drezner is a professor of international politics at Tufts University. Kori Schake, director of defense and foreign policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, has served in senior jobs in the Defense Department, the State Department, and on the National Security Council. They reflect on the lessons of Trump’s first term and whether, this time, he will take his “America first” agenda even further.

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

If there’s a thread that connects unsettling trends across domestic and international affairs today, it’s the return of forms of violence that we once thought were more or less obsolete. That’s true of the return of political violence in the United States. It’s also true of the ongoing wars in Gaza and Ukraine.

Robert Pape is a political scientist at the University of Chicago and the founding director of the Chicago Project on Security & Threats. He has made a career of studying these types of violence—whether carried out by American extremists, by suicide bombers, or by Russian or Israeli fighter jets. In a series of pieces in Foreign Affairs, he explains why all of these phenomena are likely to endure—including, in the wake of the U.S. presidential election, with what he calls an era of violent populism here at home.

He spoke with Foreign Affairs editor Dan Kurtz-Phelan on October 30 about the resurgence of these forms of violence—and the consequences for the United States and the world.

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

When Donald Trump praises foreign dictators—from Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un to Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin—the typical reaction is shock and dismay. But in fact, Beverly Gage points out in a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, such admiration is not uncommon in American politics. And Trump’s embrace of overseas autocrats is just one of the unsettling features of American civic life today that has a more prominent place in U.S. history than most observers would like to think.

Gage, a historian at Yale, has written extensively about contemporary U.S. politics, ideology, and social movements, and is the author of G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century. She spoke with Foreign Affairs senior editor Kanishk Tharoor on October 17 about the historical parallels that help us understand today’s fraught politics—as well as what set this moment apart.

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

A year has passed since Hamas’s October 7 assault on Israel sparked a brutal war in Gaza—one that is now spreading north into Lebanon and threatening to reel in bigger powers, including the United States.

But the war has always been bigger than Israel and Hamas, writes Ari Shavit in a new essay for Foreign Affairs. In his view, and the view of many Israelis, the main threat—not only to Israel but also to the free world—is Iran, backed by Russia and China. 

Shavit, a leading Israeli writer, has spent decades trying to make sense of Israel's identity, democracy, and role in the Middle East. He is the author of My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel and Existential War: From Disaster to Victory to Resurrection. Foreign Affairs Editor Daniel Kurtz-Phelan spoke with him on October 4 about how Israelis are thinking about the conflict as it enters its second year—and what it will take to bring about peace.

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

The world Americans face today is more complicated—and dangerous—than it has been for decades. Yet there is a growing, and in many ways understandable, desire to turn inward—a sense that there is little U.S. foreign policy can do to solve problems abroad and lots it can do to make them worse.

Condoleezza Rice, director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, argues against this impulse in a new essay in Foreign Affairs. Great powers, she writes, don’t get to just mind their own business. 

Rice served as national security adviser and secretary of state in the George W. Bush administration. Much of what she grappled with then—Russia’s invasion of a neighbor, military collisions with China, the last major clash between Israel and Hezbollah—has worrying echoes now, especially as conflict in the Middle East threatens to spiral into a wider war.

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

The United States is grappling with two of the biggest challenges it has ever faced: the rise of China and the threat of catastrophic climate change.

At home, the Biden administration has forged a green industrial policy that could transform the U.S. economy. But as China threatens to dominate the global market for clean energy, it is not enough to invest domestically, Brian Deese argues in a new Foreign Affairs essay.

Deese has been at the center of climate and economic policymaking for over a decade. He served as the director of the National Economic Council in the Biden administration, where he was one of the key architects behind the Inflation Reduction Act. During the Obama years, he helped lead the auto bailout and negotiate the Paris agreement on climate change.

Now, he has a plan for the United States to lead the global energy transition on its own terms.

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

In June, Narendra Modi was sworn in for a third consecutive term as India’s prime minister. But—in a surprise outcome—his party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, failed to win a parliamentary majority. Now, for the first time, Modi sits atop a coalition government—and India’s path forward appears far less certain, and far more interesting, than seemed plausible not long ago.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta is one of India’s wisest political observers—a great political theorist and writer as well as a fierce critic, and occasional target, of Modi and his policies. Foreign Affairs Senior Editor Kanishk Tharoor spoke with him on September 3 about what the election means for Indian democracy and where the country goes from here.

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

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.

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.