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PODCAST

The Foreign Affairs Interview

Foreign Affairs Magazine

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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All Episodes

43:56

Why Is America Going It Alone?

The Foreign Affairs Interview ·

2025/08/21

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

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35:12

Best of: Is the World Ready for the Population Bust?

The Foreign Affairs Interview ·

2025/08/14

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 subject

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01:19:50

Best Of: What Drives Putin and Xi

The Foreign Affairs Interview ·

2025/08/07

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

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01:08:30

The Uncertain Future of U.S. Relations With India

The Foreign Affairs Interview ·

2025/07/31

In a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, the scholar and former U.S. official Ashley J. Tellis makes a provocative argument about India’s foreign policy. In a piece titled “India’s Great-Power Delusions,” Tellis argues that Indian policymakers have their priorities wrong. Instead of pushing for what they call “multipolarity” in the international system, Indian leaders should align more closely with the United States. Tellis insists that India will be able to fend off China, its far stronger rival in

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39:10

Joseph Nye and the End of the American Century

The Foreign Affairs Interview ·

2025/07/24

For decades, Joseph Nye was one of the true giants of American foreign policy. His career, in government and in the academy, spanned epochs, and his body of work as a scholar of international relations remains unparalleled. Nye, who passed away at the age of 88 in May, served in the Carter and Clinton administrations and headed the Harvard Kennedy School for nearly two decades. But he may be best known for his contributions to the study of international relations. Nye coined the term “soft power”

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01:04:28

The Coming Nuclear Hurricane

The Foreign Affairs Interview ·

2025/07/17

It wasn’t long ago that both heads of state and prominent policymakers could speak seriously about a world without nuclear weapons. But in the course of just a few years, nuclear concerns have come back in force. Arms control has broken down almost entirely. China has started a massive expansion of its arsenal, putting basic assumptions about deterrence in doubt. Vladimir Putin has threatened nuclear use in Ukraine—threats that were taken very seriously by American officials. And proliferation risks

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01:04:13

Preparing for the World After Trump

The Foreign Affairs Interview ·

2025/07/10

For all its promise of disruption, Donald Trump’s first term as president transformed American foreign policy less than most critics feared and some supporters hoped. Alliances held up, the rules-based order largely endured, and American global leadership appeared resilient. When Joe Biden was elected president in 2020, he could proclaim “America is back” and proceed with a foreign policy that was in many ways quite traditional.But Trump’s second term has been different. In just a few months, he

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53:46

What a Stronger Europe Means for America

The Foreign Affairs Interview ·

2025/07/03

For years, U.S. presidents have complained that European governments spend far too little on their militaries, leaving the United States to pick up a disproportionate share of the tab for the transatlantic alliance. But in the past few years, Europe’s defense spending has exploded.At the NATO summit last week, U.S. allies committed to spending five percent of GDP on defense. That’s far more than the two percent target U.S. policymakers long called for. It’s even more than the United States itself

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01:05:35

How Weak Is Iran?

The Foreign Affairs Interview ·

2025/06/26

Donald Trump pledged not to entangle the United States in wars in the Middle East. But last weekend, he joined Israel’s air campaign against Iran, bombing three nuclear sites before claiming that Iranian facilities targeted by U.S. aircraft and missiles had been “obliterated.” Iran responded by firing missiles at U.S. bases in the region just before Washington announced a cease-fire.But key questions remain unanswered—about the risk of continued fighting, about Iran’s nuclear capability and

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01:01:22

Iran, Israel, and the Middle East in Tumult

The Foreign Affairs Interview ·

2025/06/18

Less than a week ago, on June 12, Israel launched a barrage of attacks against Iran, targeting nuclear sites, missile depots, and military and political leaders. Since then, the two countries have exchanged a series of attacks.Philip Gordon is the Sydney Stein, Jr. Scholar at the Brookings Institution and a longtime observer and analyst of the Middle East, and his writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs for over 20 years. He has also been one of the key practitioners of U.S. Middle East policy, as

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57:21

What Trump Gets Wrong About the Global Economy

The Foreign Affairs Interview ·

2025/06/12

U.S. President Donald Trump famously tweeted during his first term, “Trade wars are good, and easy to win.” But the record of the trade war that Trump started with his so-called Liberation Day tariffs in early April suggests that things are a bit more complicated. In an essay for Foreign Affairs appropriately titled, “Trade Wars Are Easy to Lose,” the economist Adam Posen argues that the United States has a weaker hand than the Trump administration believes. That’s especially true when it comes to

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56:09

Another China Is Possible

The Foreign Affairs Interview ·

2025/06/05

It has become a trope to lament and lambast the wishful thinking that shaped U.S. policy toward China in the two decades after the Cold War. That policy rested on a prediction about China’s future: that with economic growth and ongoing diplomatic, economic, and cultural engagement—with the United States and the rest of the world—China would become more like the United States—more politically open at home and more accepting of the existing order abroad.It is hard to deny that this prediction proved

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46:24

Sudan’s Intractable War

The Foreign Affairs Interview ·

2025/05/29

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 the

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54:13

Can Trump Remake the Middle East?

The Foreign Affairs Interview ·

2025/05/22

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 negotiations

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47:21

Has the United States Gone Rogue?

The Foreign Affairs Interview ·

2025/05/15

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,

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42:11

Understanding How Trump Sees the World

The Foreign Affairs Interview ·

2025/05/08

Donald Trump’s first National Security Strategy, released at the end of 2017, announced the start of a new era for American foreign policy—one that put great-power competition at its center and focused especially on intensifying rivalry with China. For all the dissension and turbulence in American politics since then, that framework for American foreign policy has proved remarkably durable.Nadia Schadlow is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and served as deputy national security adviser in

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36:00

Planning for a Post-American Future in Ukraine

The Foreign Affairs Interview ·

2025/05/01

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 future

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57:35

Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Fix Global Trade

The Foreign Affairs Interview ·

2025/04/24

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 unleashed

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01:02:02

Why America Shouldn’t Underestimate Chinese Power

The Foreign Affairs Interview ·

2025/04/17

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

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46:33

How Latin America Can Survive an Age of Turmoil

The Foreign Affairs Interview ·

2025/04/10

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 not

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