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.
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President Donald Trump wields American power like few leaders in U.S. history ever have. By imposing tariffs, threatening territorial conquest, and ordering military intervention, he deploys the United States’ strength to assert dominance over friends and foes alike. Stephen Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard, describes this uniquely Trumpian grand strategy as “predatory hegemony” in a new essay in Foreign Affairs . The central aim of predatory hegemony, Walt writes, “is to ...
February 24 marks the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. After Moscow’s initial onslaught, Ukrainian counteroffensives, and slow Russian gains since, the war has settled into a brutal pattern of attrition, adaptation, and endurance. Ukrainian cities are rationing electricity, as the Ukrainian military struggles to muster the manpower and munitions needed to gain a decisive edge. Meanwhile, the battlefield has become a hellscape of drones and artillery fire—with no cle...
A year into Donald Trump’s second term, the United States’ allies on both sides of the Atlantic seem to have recognized that they need a new strategy for this age of rupture, as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney called it. Trump’s grab for Greenland, his tit-for-tat tariffs on Canada, his approach in Ukraine—all have opened up rifts between the United States and many of its closest partners. Chrystia Freeland has for years been on the frontlines of the battle for the future of the alliance as ...
In 2024, there were more than 300 million migrants across the world—double the number there were in 1990. Many of those had been displaced by conflict or climate change; many were simply looking for jobs and a better life. But the national and multilateral systems designed to manage these flows have proved grossly inadequate, helping set off political convulsions not just in the United States and Europe but in countries around the world, including in Africa, Latin America, and South Asia. In dem...
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney may have made headlines when he described a “rupture” in global order in a speech at Davos last month. But long before that, policymakers and analysts had already been grappling with this unsettled—and unsettling—era in global politics. And the challenge has of course been especially great for American allies facing a very different Washington. President Alexander Stubb of Finland has become central both to navigating and to understanding this time of rupture....
One of the big surprises of Donald Trump’s second term has been the change in his approach to China. His first term marked the start of what seemed to be a hard-line consensus in Washington. But in the past year, the drivers of Trump’s policy have been much harder to decipher—including for Chinese policymakers. Beijing was prepared to respond forcefully to tough U.S. measures, as it has, most prominently, by wielding its control over rare-earth metals. Yet it has also seen new opportunities to g...
In the past year, Donald Trump has upended the global trading system and used American economic power like no president in recent memory. He’s imposed tariffs to force other countries to fall into line on commercial issues and geopolitical disputes—like this week’s threats against NATO partners over Greenland. He’s called into question the role of the dollar. And at home, he’s attacked the independence of the Federal Reserve and intervened in private-sector decision-making. Lael Brainard served ...
At the end of December, protests erupted across Iran. The government has since cracked down hard with potentially thousands of Iranians killed. It now seems possible that the United States might intervene. Via social media, U.S. President Donald Trump has told Iranian protesters that “help is on the way.” We do not know yet what, if anything, Washington will do. But the repressive regime of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is being pushed to the brink after punishing years of war and sanctions. Few observ...
It was just a few days ago that, after months of saber-rattling by the Trump administration, U.S. forces raided Venezuela and captured its leader, Nicolás Maduro. Already, Trump has suggested that the United States could “run” the country and has demanded a huge stake in Venezuela’s vast oil resources. Maduro, meanwhile, sits in a New York jail, awaiting his next court date in March. But much remains unclear—about what happens in Venezuela with Maduro gone but his regime largely still in place; ...
Odd Arne Westad, a leading historian, discusses the complex dynamics of U.S.-China relations, arguing that while the Cold War offers some lessons, the pre-World War I period provides more resonant parallels for understanding today's multipolar world. He explores China's regional ambitions, Xi Jinping's strategic use of historical narratives for legitimacy, and the increasing risks associated with flashpoints like Taiwan and China's burgeoning alliance with Russia. Westad cautions policymakers to learn from history's pitfalls to avert potential conflicts.
The world has reached various inflection points, or so we are often told. Advanced technology, such as artificial intelligence, promises to transform our way of life. In geopolitics, the growing competition between China and the United States heralds an uncertain new era. And within many democracies, the old assumptions that undergirded politics are in doubt; liberalism appears to be in disarray and illiberal forces on the rise. Few scholars are grappling with the many dimensions of the current ...
Last week, the Trump administration released its National Security Strategy. Such documents are usually fairly staid exercises in lofty rhetoric. Not this one. It harshly rebukes the strategies of prior administrations, highlighting what Trump’s team sees as the failures of traditional foreign policy elites. It pointedly criticizes Washington’s traditional allies in Europe and fixates on security issues in the Western Hemisphere, but it has little to say about American rivals such as China and R...
In the last decade, American foreign policymakers have been forced to reckon with a shifting global balance of power. Theorists have long argued over the shape of international order. But such questions now occupy practitioners, as well, as they grapple with the end of the unipolar moment that followed the Cold War and struggle to shape new strategies that account for new geopolitical realities. Emma Ashford is a leading proponent of a more restrained U.S. foreign policy. In an essay for Foreign...
In the last few years, artificial intelligence has become a central focus of geopolitical competition, and especially of U.S.-Chinese rivalry. For much of that time, the United States, or at least U.S. companies, seemed to have the advantage. But Ben Buchanan, a leading scholar of technology who crafted the Biden administration’s AI strategy, worries that the United States’ AI superiority isn’t nearly as assured as many have assumed. In an essay in the November/December issue of Foreign Affairs,...
Members of the foreign policy world have talked a lot about great-power competition over the last decade. But no one can entirely agree on the contours of today’s competition. Whether it’s a battle of autocracies and democracies. Or revisionists and status quo powers. Or whether, as the realists would argue, it’s just states doing what states do. S. C. M. Paine, a longtime professor of strategy and policy at the U.S. Naval War College, sees something else going on. To her, the great-power compet...
Robert O’Brien served as Donald Trump’s national security adviser from 2019 to 2021. O’Brien’s predecessors in that position left the administration to become some of the most vociferous critics of their former boss. O’Brien, in contrast, remained a staunch defender of Trump’s foreign policy through the Biden administration and into Trump’s second term. And perhaps as a result, he can help make some sense of the thinking behind Trump’s approach on key national security issues, drawing out the ob...
Last week’s meeting between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping may have brought a respite in the trade war. But it hardly touched the more fundamental drivers of U.S.-Chinese rivalry, a rivalry that has come to shape more and more dimensions of geopolitics, the global economy, and beyond. Few have spent as much time observing and chronicling the interactions between Washington and Beijing as Orville Schell. Schell, one of America’s foremost China hands and the author of too many books on China to name,...
If one thing can be said to characterize the first months of Donald Trump’s second term, it is his expansive and often norm-breaking use of presidential power, both abroad and at home. There are the lethal strikes on boats alleged to be smuggling drugs; the range of tariffs he’s imposed; the way he’s gone after enemies, withheld funds, and restructured the federal workforce; the list could go on. Trump has disregarded constraint after constraint on the power of the executive, and many of the for...
With a cease-fire in place in Gaza after two years of war, Donald Trump has proclaimed the arrival of peace in the Middle East. At the moment, however, it’s not even clear if the cease-fire itself will hold, let alone whether there’s a viable path to a long-term solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Few are more familiar with the elusiveness of peace in that conflict than Robert Malley. He has served as a senior Middle East official in American administrations going back to the 1990s. He...
The world has watched as a cease-fire has tentatively taken effect in Gaza. All the surviving Israeli hostages are home and many Palestinian prisoners and detainees have been released. Israeli forces have pulled back within Gaza, and much-needed humanitarian aid is rushing in. Phase One of Donald Trump’s 20-point plan seems to be working. But what happens next is more uncertain. At the time of this recording, conditions on the ground were still in flux, as the difficulty of Phase Two came into f...
Ever since Russia started its war in Ukraine, assessments of its military power have vacillated wildly. First, Russian forces were supposed to overrun Ukraine and crush any resistance in a matter of days. Then, they were thought to be so weak that a Ukrainian counteroffensive or a new capability might cause them to collapse altogether. Now, with the war in its fourth year, and Donald Trump’s return to office bringing uncertainty about Western support, it has started to seem once again that time ...
When Xi Jinping took over the Chinese Communist Party in 2012, he began a new chapter in China’s history—one that would come to be defined above all by his grip on power. Xi overhauled not only the CCP but also China’s economy, military, and role in the world. Yet no matter how secure his power may be—and no matter his recent hot-mic musings about living to 150—what comes after Xi, and how it comes, is an increasingly central question in Chinese politics. As the political scientists Tyler Jost a...
In early September, around 20 Russian drones entered Poland’s airspace. NATO and Polish forces scrambled fighter jets to shoot them down, but not before several had traveled hundreds of miles into Polish territory. To Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, the incursion was not just a test of NATO’s resolve. It was a reminder of the precarious position of the alliance’s frontline states as the war in Ukraine grinds on for its third year, and as Donald Trump upends the basic bargain of the trans...
In 2024, the U.S. government discovered that Chinese hackers had penetrated a huge swath of the American telecommunications system—and remained there for years. That attack came to be known as Salt Typhoon. China has not only managed to steal the data and surveil the communications of hundreds of millions of Americans. It also embedded itself in the United States’ most important infrastructure, giving Beijing a crucial advantage in a conflict. Anne Neuberger was until recently the top cybersecur...
Donald Trump has been railing against the global economic order from the start of his political career. But in his second term as president, he has turned that critique into blistering action. In just five months, the trade war that started with his April tariffs has completely reshaped the global economy—and struck at the very heart of the trade system that emerged after the end of the Cold War. To Michael Froman, the diagnosis is terminal. Froman, now the president of the Council on Foreign Re...
It has been almost two years since Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel and the start of the war in Gaza. Those many months of combat have left Hamas severely weakened, with its leadership eviscerated and its military capabilities crippled. But as the war enters a new phase, with Israeli troops pushing into Gaza City, the central question of the war’s endgame remains unsettled. Israeli leaders have consistently refused to offer a clear vision for the war’s aftermath, for what happens on “the day ...
For decades, the United States has used its position at the center of global financial, commercial, and technological networks to punish adversaries and pressure allies, exploiting what the political scientists Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman call “weaponized interdependence.” Lacking any alternatives, the rest of the world has had no choice but to rely on American payment systems, American technology, and American corporate might, even as Washington turned that reliance to its own strategic ad...
During his second term, Donald Trump has railed against the United States’ closest allies. He has imposed tariffs, threatened to upend security commitments, and openly challenged the borders of Canada, Panama, and Greenland. Historians often look to the past for insight about the present and future. But although alliances have collapsed for many reasons over past centuries, Margaret MacMillan argues in a recent essay for Foreign Affairs that Trump’s current behavior toward allies has little prec...
In an episode released in January 2025, Senior Editor Kanishk Tharoor spoke with the political economist Nicholas Eberstadt about the global crash in fertility rates and the looming prospect of depopulation. 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 Eberstadt, that chapter of human history is over, and a new era, which he calls the age of depopulation, has begun. That subje...
In 2023, Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke with the historians Stephen Kotkin and Orville Schell about what drives Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin and how they are (and are not) like Mao and Stalin. Xi and Putin loom over geopolitics in a way that few leaders have in decades. Not even Mao and Stalin drove global events the way Xi and Putin do today. Who they are, how they view the world, and what they want are some of the most important and pressing questions in foreign po...
