The Foreign Affairs Interview

At the end of last year, editor Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke with the historian Odd Arne Westad about China’s complicated past and how that history shapes the way Chinese leaders see their country’s place in the world today. 

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, China now poses a profound challenge to American interests. And as leaders in Beijing watch Washington struggle against Iran, rankle allies and partners, and retreat from the international system it built, they sense a moment of opportunity—and are looking to their own history for the lessons, or warnings, it might hold. 

No one brings more perspective to these arguments than Westad. In a series of essays in Foreign Affairs over the past few years, Westad has explored the drivers of China’s foreign policy, its approach to global power, and its fraught ties with the United States. He sees in the long arc of Chinese and global history a stark warning about the potential for greater conflict, including a war between China and the United States. He also, however, sees lessons for policymakers today about how to avert such an outcome.

You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

It’s been nearly 15 years since Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta warned of a “cyber–Pearl Harbor.” Since then, most people have become fairly inured to such a risk. That’s true even as there’s been a steady clip of cyberattacks on the United States and other countries, some of them quite alarming, and even as a new, more powerful AI model is released by an American or Chinese lab seemingly every week.

Jen Easterly has spent much of the past 20 years defending U.S. cyberspace against such threats. She has been both a military officer and a top civilian official, most recently running the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Now, she warns, the danger is about to get much worse. For all the talk of AI-enabled cyberattacks, and the attention on scarily powerful models from American labs like Anthropic and OpenAI and from their Chinese counterparts, Easterly worries that the world still fails to appreciate both the magnitude of the threat and the speed with which a true crisis could be approaching. Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke to Easterly on Thursday, July 30.

You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

Almost no one in the last several decades has done more to change the American approach to trade than Robert Lighthizer. Lighthizer was the U.S. trade representative in President Donald Trump’s first term. In that role, he set out to reverse Washington’s long-standing commitment to a global trading system. It was a crusade—using tariffs, among other tools—that targeted China above all but also any other country that, as he saw it, benefited from that system at the expense of the United States.

Lighthizer recently laid out his vision for a new trade order in Foreign Affairs. With Trump levying tariffs and wielding American economic power against both allies and adversaries, Lighthizer argues that the free trade system should be thrown out, replaced with one that is more balanced, sovereign, and transparent.

Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke with Lighthizer on the sidelines of the Aspen Security Forum on Wednesday, July 15.

You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

In the nine months since a cease-fire ended full-on war in Gaza, the world’s attention has in many ways moved on. That has been especially true since February, with the start of the war in Iran. But the situation in Gaza remains grim and unsettled, and the state of affairs in the West Bank has become increasingly fraught. Meanwhile, the way forward for Palestinian politics is murky, and the prospect of any durable resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems more remote than ever.

Salam Fayyad served as Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority from 2007 to 2013, after a long career at the International Monetary Fund. In many capitals, including Washington, Fayyad is still considered one of the most effective Palestinian leaders of recent decades.

Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke with him on July 15, on the sidelines of the Aspen Security Forum, about his proposals for building a Palestinian state, delivering humane and effective governance in Gaza, and finding a viable way forward for the Palestinian cause.

You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

The war in Iran pitted two of the world’s mightiest militaries against one weakened by years of strikes, sanctions, and sabotage. And yet it was the smaller country that appears to have emerged with the advantage. In Ukraine, similarly, Russia expected an easy victory, only to be repeatedly thwarted by apparently outmatched Ukrainian forces. These outcomes may seem surprising. But Paul Scharre argues that they should not be. The innovations that have in recent years transformed battlefields have also leveled the playing field between powers great and small. And as Scharre wrote in a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, the U.S. military is unprepared for a new age of warfare in which drones, AI, and other emerging technologies undercut the dominance it has become used to.

Scharre, the executive vice president of the Center for a New American Security, served as an Army Ranger in Iraq and Afghanistan and then went on to craft Pentagon policy on drones and autonomous weapons systems. Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke with him about what the wars in Iran and Ukraine should tell us about the future of warfare more generally, about what China is learning from those wars, and about what the United States must do to adapt.

You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.