Foreign Affairs invites you to join its editor, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, as he talks to influential thinkers and policymakers about the forces shaping the world. Whether the topic is the war in Ukraine, the United States’ competition with China, or the future of globalization, Foreign Affairs’ weekly podcast offers the kind of authoritative commentary and analysis that you can find in the magazine and on the website.
The war in Sudan gets only a fraction of the attention that conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza and potential conflicts elsewhere get. But after two years of fighting, it has created the biggest humanitarian crisis ever recorded. And as the two sides in the conflict, the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, vie for control of the country and its resources, there is little hope of a conclusion any time soon. As the war goes on, and a growing number of outside powers look for advantage in...
Donald Trump just finished his first tour of the Middle East since returning to the White House. The region has changed a lot since he was last there as president. There’s been Hamas’s attack on Israel, the ensuing Israeli retaliation, the weakening of Iran and its proxies, and the fall of the Assad regime in Syria. Trump used the visit to announce flashy deals with Gulf leaders and to commit to lifting sanctions on Syria. But with big questions remaining about Gaza and about nuclear negotiation...
In a little more than 100 days, Donald Trump has set about dismantling much of the international order that has prevailed since World War II. That’s true of traditional U.S. approaches to trade, to conflict, alliances, international organizations, and more. But as much as we focus on Trump, Michael Beckley argues that much of this change in U.S. foreign policy has deeper roots, going to the very nature of American power. The United States is increasingly a “rogue superpower,” Beckley has written...
Nadia Schadlow discusses the evolution and potential future of U.S. foreign policy under Trump, focusing on great power competition with China and Russia. She analyzes Trump's approach to Ukraine, Asia, and global trade, emphasizing the need for a balance of power and strategic ambiguity. The conversation explores the complexities of international relations and the challenges of navigating a multipolar world.
Donald Trump famously promised to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of returning to the White House. But he is just over 100 days into his presidency, and the war is certainly not over. With Kyiv opposed to territorial concessions, and with Russia’s military campaign showing no signs of slowing down, the Trump administration has threatened to walk away from the conflict if both sides don’t agree to a cease-fire and a path to peace—leaving Ukraine and its European partners planning for a fut...
Donald Trump’s embrace of tariffs should come as no surprise. For decades, he has claimed that other countries are ripping Americans off—and promised to use tariffs to remake a global trade system that, in his view, has been deeply unfair to the United States. But almost no one anticipated a trade and tariff policy as extreme and erratic as the one the world has seen since Trump proclaimed “Liberation Day” at the beginning of April. The sweeping tariffs on U.S. partners and rivals alike unleashe...
For years in U.S. foreign policy circles, discussions of China focused on its growing wealth, power, and ambition, and the fear that it would supplant the United States. But a few years ago, the conversation took a sharp turn. Rather than fixating on China’s rise, most analysis began to focus on the country’s stagnation and even decline. There were good reasons for this: disappointing post-COVID economic growth, dire demographics, and a foreign policy alienating much of the world. And so a new c...
For decades, it has been a trope of foreign policy commentary in the United States that Washington does not pay enough attention to its own hemisphere. But the Trump administration seems to be bucking this trend—though not exactly in the way those complaining about neglect might have wanted. President Donald Trump’s campaign spent a lot of time focusing on immigration and fentanyl coming from Latin America. And in the early months of his administration, Trump has focused to a surprising degree n...
Two months into U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term, the U.S.-Chinese relationship—the most consequential one in the world by a long stretch—faces new uncertainty. Trump has threatened larger tariffs as China has continued its military buildup and activities in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea. But Trump has also focused his ire on allied capitals, rather than on Beijing, and talked about making a deal with his “very good friend” Xi Jinping. In a recent essay for Foreign Affairs, Jude...
Not even two months into his second term, U.S. President Donald Trump is reshaping U.S.-Russian relations at a critical juncture for the war in Ukraine. As Russian President Vladimir Putin presses his advantage on the battlefield, Trump’s admiration for the Russian leader, and his push for warmer relations with Moscow, is raising alarms across European capitals—in Kyiv most of all. Fiona Hill spent years studying Putin and Russia as a scholar and U.S. intelligence official before serving, in the...
After three years of war, Ukraine is facing intense pressure from Donald Trump to reach a settlement with Russia. Trump has engaged directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin while calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a dictator. His administration has sidelined European allies while joining a handful of Russian partners in voting against a UN resolution condemning Putin’s aggression. And U.S. officials have pressured Ukraine into signing over critical mineral resources. And yet de...
In this episode, Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way discuss their essay, "The Path to American Authoritarianism," exploring the concept of competitive authoritarianism and its potential impact on the U.S. They analyze how Trump's second term poses a unique threat due to his control over the Republican Party and the systematic weaponization of the state. The discussion covers historical precedents, the role of the civil service, and the co-option of various sectors, highlighting the risks to American democracy.
From record-low unemployment to strong GDP growth, the Biden administration presided over what appeared to be a strong economic recovery in the aftermath of the pandemic. But these measures masked a more complex reality, argues Jason Furman in a new essay in Foreign Affairs. That reality, in his view, should reshape debates about economic strategies going forward. Furman, now Aetna Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy at Harvard University, chaired the White House Council of Economic Adv...
After nearly three years of war, the mood among many of Ukraine’s allies has turned grim. Russian forces are making steady gains; Kyiv is running low on ammunition; and the return of Donald Trump to the White House has only added to anxieties about the conflict, casting doubt over not only the future of American military aid, but also the prospect of a negotiated settlement that is satisfactory to Ukraine. In an essay for Foreign Affairs, titled “ Putin’s Point of No Return ,” Andrea Kendall-Tay...
With Donald Trump about to return to the White House, leaders around the world are bracing for what could be a significant realignment in U.S. foreign policy—and trying to prepare their own country’s response. In a special two-part episode, Foreign Affairs Editor Dan Kurtz-Phelan speaks with two policymakers who have grappled directly with the disruption that may come in Trump 2.0. Malcolm Turnbull, who was Australia’s prime minister during Trump’s first term, shares his lessons about how leader...
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 po...
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 securit...
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 betwee...
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 Depar...
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...
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 polit...
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 ...
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 a...
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 sp...
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 busines...
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...
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 criti...
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 po...
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 Ca...
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 Unit...
