The Foreign Affairs Interview

The United States’ relationship with China has scarcely been so contentious. Over the last several years, the two powers have butted heads over issues including trade and technology, Russia’s war on Ukraine, and Beijing’s belligerence in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait. Nicholas Burns has helped oversee Washington’s response to these rising tensions.

Burns has served as U.S. ambassador to China since 2022, the capstone of a four-decade career in the foreign service that has included posts as ambassador to NATO and Greece, State Department undersecretary for political affairs and spokesperson, and on the National Security Council staff on Soviet and Russian affairs. He has been in the room for some of the most consequential moments in recent U.S. foreign policy history: the fall of the Soviet Union, the 9/11 attacks, and now, the intensifying U.S.-Chinese competition.

Two years after his first conversation with editor Dan Kurtz-Phelan, Burns, in his final days as ambassador, looks back on the Biden administration’s approach to managing the relationship at this critical moment—and reflects on the need for diplomacy in the rivalry that may define the twenty-first century.

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

Over the past century, the world’s population has exploded—surging from around one and a half billion people in 1900 to roughly eight billion today. But according to the political economist Nicholas Eberstadt, that chapter of human history is over, and a new era, which he calls the age of depopulation, has begun. 

Eberstadt is the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute and has written extensively on demographics, economic development, and international security. In a recent essay for Foreign Affairs, Eberstadt argued that plummeting fertility rates everywhere from the United States and Europe to India and China point to a new demographic order—one that will transform societies, economies, and geopolitics.

Eberstadt spoke with senior editor Kanishk Tharoor about what is driving today’s population decline, why policy cannot reverse it, and how governments can reckon with a shrinking world.

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

In the four years since U.S. President Joe Biden took office, the geopolitical landscape has radically changed. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine brought war back to Europe. Hamas’s October 7 assault on Israel sparked a widening conflict in an already chaotic Middle East. And Chinese aggression in the Taiwan Strait has refocused attention on the Indo-Pacific as a possible theater of combat.

Through it all, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been at the helm of U.S. foreign policy: shuttling between capitals, negotiating with allies and adversaries, and helping shape a vision for American engagement with the world—a vision he laid out in a recent essay for Foreign Affairs. 

Now, on the eve of Donald Trump’s return to office, Blinken reflects on the geopolitical challenges facing the United States today—and offers lessons from his own tenure for American foreign policy going forward.

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

Over the last few years, the world has seen the outbreak of a kind of war that had long seemed like a thing of the past. There was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; a Gaza war that threatened to turn into a full Middle Eastern war, and in many ways did; growing dangers in the Taiwan Strait or South China Sea; and tremendously damaging fighting in places like Sudan that get much less global attention. 

Mara Karlin, a scholar of war as well as a veteran policymaker, served as the top U.S. Defense Department official overseeing strategy as these conflicts started or escalated. She is currently Professor of Practice at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and the author of several books including The Inheritance: America’s Military After Two Decades of War. She argues in an essay in Foreign Affairs that the world is seeing a return of total war—of conflicts that are more comprehensive and complex than ever before.

Karlin joins Editor Dan Kurtz-Phelan to discuss how fighting in Ukraine and the Middle East is reshaping our understanding of modern war, and what this means for U.S. military strategy—especially in the face of growing tensions with China.

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

Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 U.S. presidential election comes at a moment of turbulence for global democracy. It’s been a year marked by almost universal backlash against incumbent leaders by voters apparently eager to express their anger with the status quo—and also an era when liberalism has been in retreat, if not in crisis.

Francis Fukuyama, a political scientist at Stanford University, has done as much as anyone to elucidate the currents shaping and reshaping global politics. He wrote The End of History and the Last Man, a seminal work of post–Cold War political theory, more than three decades ago. And in the years since, he has written a series of influential essays for Foreign Affairs and other publications. 

He joins Editor Dan Kurtz-Phelan to consider what Trump’s return to the presidency means for liberal democracy—and whether its future, in the United States and around the world, is truly at stake.

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