The 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For months, Iran and Israel have seemed to be on the brink of outright war. Although tensions are lower than in April—when the countries exchanged direct attacks—they remain dangerously high.

Vali Nasr has tracked these dynamics since long before October 7. He is the Majid Khadduri professor of international affairs and Middle East studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center. He served as the eighth dean of Johns Hopkins SAIS between 2012 and 2019. During the Obama administration, he served as senior adviser to the legendary diplomat Richard Holbrooke.

He warns that as long as war rages in Gaza, the Middle East will remain on the verge of exploding. Yet it is not enough for Washington to focus just on ending that war. It must also put in place a regional order that can free the Middle East from these cycles of violence.

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

There’s no question that Hamas violated international law when it attacked Israel on October 7, and as it continues to hold hostages in Gaza. But more than seven months into Israel’s response, the issue of whether Israel is violating international law—or even committing war crimes—is coming to a head. Washington is debating holding up deliveries of weapons to Israel. And the International Criminal Court is rumored to be preparing a case against leaders of both Hamas and the Israeli government.

What’s happening in Gaza may seem unprecedented. But as the legal scholar Oona Hathaway writes in Foreign Affairs, “The conflict in Gaza is an extreme example of the breakdown of the law of war, but it is not an isolated one.” Hathaway is the Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law at Yale University School of Law and a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In 2014–15, she took leave to serve as special counsel to the general counsel at the U.S. Department of Defense.

Foreign Affairs Deputy Editor Kate Brannen spoke with her on May 13 about the causes of that breakdown—and what, if anything, can be done to salvage the rules meant to protect civilians in wartime.

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