Orville Schell may be the United States’ greatest chronicler and observer of several decades of U.S.-Chinese relations. Foreign Affairs was extremely lucky to have him in Beijing this week for the summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping. It was not the first time Schell has had a front-row seat at a meeting of U.S. and Chinese leaders. Editor Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke to him on Friday, May 15, about how he read the interactions between Xi and Trump, what they did—and did not—say about the hardest and most dangerous issues in the U.S.-Chinese relationship, and how this could mark an inflection point for the two countries.

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

Not long ago, it was practically a truism to say that a hard line on China was the only real bipartisan position in American foreign policy. To the extent such a consensus ever existed, Donald Trump has upended it in his second term—leaving considerable uncertainty about just what he wants to achieve when he travels to China to meet with Xi Jinping this week, and what Xi hopes to achieve in return.

To make sense of how the Chinese are approaching the summit and the options U.S. policymakers have at their disposal, Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke to Nicholas Burns, a longtime American diplomat who served as ambassador to China until January of 2025.

In this special bonus episode recorded on Thursday, May 7, Burns discusses the issues that will take center stage when Trump meets Xi—from trade and technology to Iran, Taiwan, and Ukraine—and the enormous stakes for U.S.-Chinese competition going forward.

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

Fiona Hill has spent her career trying to understand—and, in one case, advise— leaders with grandiose ambitions, high risk tolerance, and an unshakeable sense of themselves as world-historic figures. She has been a close observer of Vladimir Putin for decades, as a scholar and a member of the U.S. intelligence community. In Donald Trump’s first term, she was a senior member of the National Security Council before becoming a household name during Trump’s first impeachment, for testifying about his relationship with Putin and with Volodymyr Zelensky.

Now, Hill is watching as Trump and Putin, as well as Xi Jinping and others, upend global order, and policymakers everywhere try to navigate the most turbulent period in recent memory—while the rest of the world tries to discern what might come in its wake.

Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke to Hill on the morning of Tuesday, May 5, about the wars in Ukraine and Iran, the predicament faced by American allies, and what Trump’s second-term foreign policy will mean for the future of American power.

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

For most of the past few decades, North Korea was considered a top challenge for American foreign policy. In the past few years, however, it has mostly receded from attention—not because the U.S. approach to the problem succeeded but because it so completely failed. U.S. policy insisted that North Korea could never become a nuclear power, yet North Korea’s program has accelerated year by year, threatening not just American allies, but now the American homeland. U.S. policy aimed to isolate the Kim family’s totalitarian regime, yet the North Korean leadership has managed to skillfully navigate the new geopolitics, solidifying its rule and bolstering ties with both China and Russia. The commitment to pursuing nuclear weapons no matter the cost has looked especially savvy in the wake of U.S. attacks on Iran.

Victor Cha has long been one of the foremost practitioners and analysts of U.S. policy toward North Korea. In a new essay for Foreign Affairs, he argues that Washington must reckon with this long record of failure and craft a new strategy for managing the North Korea problem, one that gives up for now on denuclearization and tries to achieve what Cha calls a cold peace. 

Editor Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke to Cha on Monday, April 27, about the misjudgments at the heart of U.S. policy; about the nature of the North Korean threat today; and about what a new approach would mean for the United States, for the Korean peninsula, and for Asia more broadly 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.

It is an understatement to say that the United States finds itself at a particularly fraught geopolitical juncture. The outcome of the war in Iran is still uncertain. The war in Ukraine continues with no end in sight. Add to that U.S.-Chinese competition, overlapping planetary crises, a highly erratic hegemon—the list could go on.

Such an unstable world presents a formidable test for policymakers in Washington and in every other capital, and no one understands that test better than Jake Sullivan. He served as U.S. President Joe Biden’s national security adviser for four years, after serving in a number of senior national security jobs in the Obama administration. Much of what he dealt with in those jobs, including China, Gaza, Iran, and Ukraine, remains at crisis or near-crisis levels for U.S. foreign policy today. And, as Sullivan writes in a new essay for Foreign Affairs, technological change, especially in AI, is adding new layers of complexity and risk to all of those challenges.

Dan Kurtz-Phelan, who worked for Sullivan at the State Department in the first part of the Obama administration, spoke with him on Monday, April 20, about the key tests for the United States today, and about what American power will look like after U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term.

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

The shockwaves of the ongoing war in Iran are being felt far and wide. The continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz has sparked a global energy crisis, one that could be accentuated by a U.S. naval blockade. Countries as disparate as Chile, South Korea, and Zambia have been forced to take extraordinary measures to deal with shortages and surging prices. But the war’s effects are not just material. Washington’s decision to attack Iran is accelerating a process already underway: the receding of both the inspiration and the reality of American power.

That, at least, is the view of our two guests in this episode. Matias Spektor is a professor of Politics and International Relations at Fundação Getulio Vargas in São Paulo. Kishore Mahbubani is a distinguished fellow at the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore and a veteran Singaporean diplomat, who served as his country’s ambassador to the United Nations for over a decade.

In their essays for Foreign Affairs, both Spektor and Mahbubani have sought to alert readers to changes in geopolitics that may be hard to see from Western capitals. The war on Iran, in their view, is misguided in its motivations and its execution. And its consequences could be hugely damaging for the United States, offering further proof that the world may be slipping out of the United States’ grasp.

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

On Tuesday night, as the world held its collective breath, U.S. President Donald Trump announced a temporary cease-fire with Iran, just hours after warning that “a whole civilization will die” if the Iranian regime did not completely open the Strait of Hormuz. In exchange for a cessation of American and Israeli strikes, Iran has agreed to allow oil and other commodities to pass through the strait for two weeks and to stop its own attacks on its neighbors, giving both sides time to negotiate a more comprehensive peace deal. But many of the details of the cease-fire remain unclear, as do its chances of holding. A war that began with Trump’s call for regime change now seems destined to leave the Iranian regime in place, emboldened and more certain of its resilience than ever before.

Suzanne Maloney is vice president of the Brookings Institution and director of its Foreign Policy program. She has helped craft U.S. Middle East policy, serving in positions in the White House and the State Department across multiple administrations. Executive Editor Justin Vogt spoke with her on the morning of Wednesday, April 8, to help make sense of the cease-fire and get a grasp on what might come next.

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

In 2024, when he was the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, William Burns wrote in an essay in Foreign Affairs about “the plastic moments that come along only a few times each century”—and argued that “the United States faces one of those rare moments today, as consequential as the dawn of the Cold War or the post-9/11 period.”

If that claim seemed bold at the time, events in the past couple of years have made it undeniable—a major war in Europe, two wars in the Middle East, sharpening U.S.-Chinese tensions, a U.S. administration committed to projecting power in new and disruptive ways, and technologies adding complexity across all of these other challenges. “Inflection point” is an overused term. But this is a moment when, as Burns argued in that essay, it really does fit.

Before becoming CIA director, Burns was one of the most highly respected diplomats in recent American history. He started the secret negotiations that led to the Iran nuclear deal. He served as ambassador to Russia. As the State Department’s top Middle East official, he warned internally of the consequences of invading Iraq in 2003. He has spent years sitting across the table from American allies and adversaries, trying to understand what drives them and how Washington should—and should not—deal with them.

Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke to Burns on the afternoon of April 1 about the course and consequences of the war in Iran, about Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine, about Xi Jinping and U.S.-Chinese competition, about the future of intelligence, and about what the Trump administration will mean for the future of American power. 

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

Just a few weeks after its opening salvos, the war in Iran is already going global. Iran has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, stranding oil tankers and causing energy prices to skyrocket. Donald Trump has asked European partners to help restore freedom of navigation. So far, they have largely rebuffed his requests for military assistance. But as the economic pain mounts, their resolve will surely be tested.

Europe’s difficult position is indicative of a dilemma the continent’s leaders have faced since Trump’s return: whether to marshal their resources and will to push back against Trump’s coercion, or to give in to it. In 2025, according to the political scientists Nathalie Tocci and Matthias Matthijs, they chose wrong. “Instead of insisting on bargaining with the United States as an equal partner,” Tocci and Matthijs wrote in a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, Europe “reflexively and consistently adopted a posture of submission.” 

But this year, Europe seems to have begun to stand up to the United States. In January, it strongly rejected Trump’s posturing over Greenland. Now, with Washington pressuring European countries to support its war on Iran, Europe may have no choice but to assert itself. Deputy Editor Chloe Fox spoke with Tocci and Matthijs on Tuesday, March 24, about the choices facing Europe in the age of Trump.

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

When the United States and Israel launched a joint war on Iran two weeks ago, U.S. President Donald Trump urged Iranians to rise up and rid themselves of their tyrannical rulers. He seemed buoyed by his success in swiftly removing Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro in January. But the war in Iran has not progressed as smoothly as Trump might have liked. The authoritarian regime that runs the Islamic Republic remains firmly in place. 

The historian Stephen Kotkin, who is the Kleinheinz senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, has spent decades thinking about how these regimes function, how they survive, and how they come to an end. In “The Weakness of the Strongmen,” an essay in the January/February issue of Foreign Affairs, Kotkin anatomized authoritarianism, arguing that many of the features that bolster autocrats also present vulnerabilities. 

Kotkin is the preeminent biographer of the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, a close observer of contemporary Russian and Chinese politics, and a sharp analyst of American foreign policy. He spoke with Executive Editor Justin Vogt on Friday, March 13, and explained what makes authoritarian regimes tick, how their weaknesses can be exploited, and what history tells us about the prospects of success for the American and Israeli effort at regime change in Iran.

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