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 China, the world’s second-largest economy and perhaps the real target of Trump’s trade offensive. “It is China that has escalation dominance in this trade war,” Posen writes. “Washington, not Beijing, is betting all in on a losing hand.”
Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke to Posen, who is president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, on June 9 about the short- and long-term effects of Trump’s tariffs and the economic uncertainty they’ve caused, about what it would take to constructively remake the global economy, and about the growing risks to the United States’ economic position at an especially dangerous time.
You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.
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57:21
Another China Is Possible
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 wrong. But Rana Mitter, the S.T. Lee Chair in U.S.-Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School and one of the great historians of China, reminds readers that predictions about China almost always prove wrong. And as he writes in a new essay in Foreign Affairs, it would be equally foolish to assume that China must remain on its current trajectory of more confrontation abroad and repression at home. “Another China remains possible,” Mitter argues. And how that China develops will be one of the most important factors in geopolitics for decades to come.
You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.
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56:09
Sudan’s Intractable War
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 carnage, the consequences are likely to get even worse, argue Mai Hassan and Ahmed Kodouda in a recent Foreign Affairs essay—not just for Sudan, but for the rest of its region as well.
Both Hassan, an Associate Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Kodouda, a humanitarian policy expert who was based in Sudan until March 2023, have spent years watching what is happening in Sudan. They joined senior editor Eve Fairbanks to discuss the roots of what has become an intractable conflict, and whether a path out of it is possible.
You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.
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46:24
Can Trump Remake the Middle East?
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 with Iran, the future of the region and the U.S. role in it remain unsettled.
In a recent essay for Foreign Affairs, Dana Stroul argues that a new regional order could emerge from the recent upheaval—but only if Washington takes the lead in what will undoubtedly be an intricate political process. Stroul is director of research and the Shelly and Michael Kassen senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. During the Biden administration, she served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, witnessing firsthand how quickly new regional power dynamics can take shape—and how quickly they can unravel.
Stroul spoke with Dan Kurtz-Phelan on May 20 to discuss the prospect of a new Iranian nuclear deal, the future of Israeli policy in Gaza, and what Trump’s recent moves herald for the new Middle East.
You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.
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54:13
Has the United States Gone Rogue?
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, “neither internationalist nor isolationist but aggressive, powerful, and increasingly out for itself.” How this America interacts, not just with adversaries like China but also with allies and others, may be the most important question in geopolitics today.
Beckley is an associate professor of political science at Tufts University, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and Asia director at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and has been one of the sharpest analysts of American grand strategy in an era of deepening great-power competition.
Beckley joined Dan Kurtz-Phelan on May 13 to discuss both the resilience of American power and the risks to it—and what the global transformation now underway will mean for U.S. interests going forward.
You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.
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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