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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

65:40

America’s War of Choice on Iran

The Foreign Affairs Interview ·

2026/03/05

Over the weekend, U.S. and Israeli forces struck hundreds of sites across Iran and killed its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Large crowds of Iranians took to the streets, some to mourn, others to celebrate. The Islamic Republic has retaliated and launched strikes of its own across the Middle East. Much about the joint U.S.-Israeli operation remains unclear—was it meant to eliminate Iran’s nuclear capabilities after failed negotiations? Was it meant to force regime change? With no path to

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56:39

America the Predatory Hegemon

The Foreign Affairs Interview ·

2026/02/26

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 use

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60:51

Bonus: Is There an Endgame in Ukraine?

The Foreign Affairs Interview ·

2026/02/21

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 clear

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39:05

Can America’s Allies Survive the Transatlantic Rupture?

The Foreign Affairs Interview ·

2026/02/19

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

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56:00

The Myths and Realities of Global Migration

The Foreign Affairs Interview ·

2026/02/12

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

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57:58

How to Navigate the Shifting International Order

The Foreign Affairs Interview ·

2026/02/05

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

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62:07

Is China Leaving the United States Behind?

The Foreign Affairs Interview ·

2026/01/29

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 gain

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55:42

The Erosion of the Sources of American Economic Power

The Foreign Affairs Interview ·

2026/01/22

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 as

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64:15

What Kind of Change Is Coming to Iran?

The Foreign Affairs Interview ·

2026/01/13

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 observers

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82:27

What Comes Next in Venezuela

The Foreign Affairs Interview ·

2026/01/08

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; how

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59:14

How the Past Shadows China’s Future

The Foreign Affairs Interview ·

2026/01/01

The biggest questions in U.S. foreign policy today tend to be about China. Policymakers and analysts argue over the implications of China’s rise, the extent of its ambitions, the nature of its economic influence, and the meaning of its growing military strength. Underlying these arguments is a widespread sense that where Beijing once seemed likely to slot comfortably into a U.S.-led international order, it now poses a profound challenge to American interests.No one brings more perspective to these

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58:09

How Liberal Democracy Can Survive an Age of Spiraling...

The Foreign Affairs Interview ·

2025/12/18

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

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42:55

The Fear and Weakness at the Heart of Trump’s Strategy

The Foreign Affairs Interview ·

2025/12/11

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

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51:40

America Can’t Escape the Multipolar Order

The Foreign Affairs Interview ·

2025/12/04

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

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54:59

The Limits of the American Way of AI

The Foreign Affairs Interview ·

2025/11/27

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,

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33:41

The Age-Old Contest Between Land and Sea

The Foreign Affairs Interview ·

2025/11/20

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

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66:59

The Strength of Trump’s Foreign Policy

The Foreign Affairs Interview ·

2025/11/13

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

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56:45

Xi Jinping’s World of Treachery and Sacrifice

The Foreign Affairs Interview ·

2025/11/06

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, has

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57:58

The Crack-Up of American Democracy

The Foreign Affairs Interview ·

2025/10/30

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 forces

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64:50

America’s Two-State Delusion

The Foreign Affairs Interview ·

2025/10/23

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 has

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