The Foreign Affairs Interview

Like the rest of us, China’s leaders are confronting a world in turmoil. They see uncertain American commitments to allies, even as many of those allies ramp up their own defense efforts. They see changing relationships, whether deepening ties between Russia and North Korea or new connections among anxious middle powers. They see American military action in the Middle East and Western Hemisphere, with effects on American power in China’s own region. And yet, as Oriana Skylar Mastro sees it, far from surprising Beijing, such disruptions are being taken as confirmation of what Chinese leader Xi Jinping often refers to as “great change unseen in a century.” Mastro has written a series of essays for Foreign Affairs on how Beijing aims to shape and exploit that change. She joined Dan Kurtz-Phelan to discuss China’s strategy for navigating this turmoil—and what the United States should, and should not, do in response. 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 may have come to an end, but both the course and the conclusion of that war have brought into sharp relief the forces that increasingly define a world of weaponized power and systemic risk: unconstrained leaders willing to gamble with military force; the search for, and use of, economic leverage; technologies destabilizing both decision-making and development models; and old alliances fracturing and new alignments forming. Ian Bremmer is a leading geopolitical analyst and the president and founder of the Eurasia Group. His most recent piece for Foreign Affairs is about the long-term consequences of the Iran war, but he has also written on shifts in global power, the effect of technology on geopolitics, and much else. Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke to Bremmer on Monday, June 22, about how to make sense of today’s global turmoil. You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

For most of the past few decades, North Korea was considered a top challenge for American foreign policy. In the past few years, however, it has mostly receded from attention—not because the U.S. approach to the problem succeeded but because it so completely failed. U.S. policy insisted that North Korea could never become a nuclear power, yet North Korea’s program has accelerated year by year, threatening not just American allies, but now the American homeland. U.S. policy aimed to isolate the Kim family’s totalitarian regime, yet the North Korean leadership has managed to skillfully navigate the new geopolitics, solidifying its rule and bolstering ties with both China and Russia. The commitment to pursuing nuclear weapons no matter the cost has looked especially savvy in the wake of U.S. attacks on Iran. Victor Cha has long been one of the foremost practitioners and analysts of U.S. policy toward North Korea. In a new essay for Foreign Affairs, he argues that Washington must reckon with this long record of failure and craft a new strategy for managing the North Korea problem, one that gives up for now on denuclearization and tries to achieve what Cha calls a cold peace. Editor Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke to Cha on Monday, April 27, about the misjudgments at the heart of U.S. policy; about the nature of the North Korean threat today; and about what a new approach would mean for the United States, for the Korean peninsula, and for Asia more broadly in the years ahead. You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

It is an understatement to say that the United States finds itself at a particularly fraught geopolitical juncture. The outcome of the war in Iran is still uncertain. The war in Ukraine continues with no end in sight. Add to that U.S.-Chinese competition, overlapping planetary crises, a highly erratic hegemon—the list could go on. Such an unstable world presents a formidable test for policymakers in Washington and in every other capital, and no one understands that test better than Jake Sullivan. He served as U.S. President Joe Biden’s national security adviser for four years, after serving in a number of senior national security jobs in the Obama administration. Much of what he dealt with in those jobs, including China, Gaza, Iran, and Ukraine, remains at crisis or near-crisis levels for U.S. foreign policy today. And, as Sullivan writes in a new essay for Foreign Affairs, technological change, especially in AI, is adding new layers of complexity and risk to all of those challenges. Dan Kurtz-Phelan, who worked for Sullivan at the State Department in the first part of the Obama administration, spoke with him on Monday, April 20, about the key tests for the United States today, and about what American power will look like after U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term. You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

The shockwaves of the ongoing war in Iran are being felt far and wide. The continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz has sparked a global energy crisis, one that could be accentuated by a U.S. naval blockade. Countries as disparate as Chile, South Korea, and Zambia have been forced to take extraordinary measures to deal with shortages and surging prices. But the war’s effects are not just material. Washington’s decision to attack Iran is accelerating a process already underway: the receding of both the inspiration and the reality of American power. That, at least, is the view of our two guests in this episode. Matias Spektor is a professor of Politics and International Relations at Fundação Getulio Vargas in São Paulo. Kishore Mahbubani is a distinguished fellow at the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore and a veteran Singaporean diplomat, who served as his country’s ambassador to the United Nations for over a decade. In their essays for Foreign Affairs, both Spektor and Mahbubani have sought to alert readers to changes in geopolitics that may be hard to see from Western capitals. The war on Iran, in their view, is misguided in its motivations and its execution. And its consequences could be hugely damaging for the United States, offering further proof that the world may be slipping out of the United States’ grasp. You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

On Tuesday night, as the world held its collective breath, U.S. President Donald Trump announced a temporary cease-fire with Iran, just hours after warning that “a whole civilization will die” if the Iranian regime did not completely open the Strait of Hormuz. In exchange for a cessation of American and Israeli strikes, Iran has agreed to allow oil and other commodities to pass through the strait for two weeks and to stop its own attacks on its neighbors, giving both sides time to negotiate a more comprehensive peace deal. But many of the details of the cease-fire remain unclear, as do its chances of holding. A war that began with Trump’s call for regime change now seems destined to leave the Iranian regime in place, emboldened and more certain of its resilience than ever before. Suzanne Maloney is vice president of the Brookings Institution and director of its Foreign Policy program. She has helped craft U.S. Middle East policy, serving in positions in the White House and the State Department across multiple administrations. Executive Editor Justin Vogt spoke with her on the morning of Wednesday, April 8, to help make sense of the cease-fire and get a grasp on what might come next. You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

In 2024, when he was the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, William Burns wrote in an essay in Foreign Affairs about “the plastic moments that come along only a few times each century”—and argued that “the United States faces one of those rare moments today, as consequential as the dawn of the Cold War or the post-9/11 period.” If that claim seemed bold at the time, events in the past couple of years have made it undeniable—a major war in Europe, two wars in the Middle East, sharpening U.S.-Chinese tensions, a U.S. administration committed to projecting power in new and disruptive ways, and technologies adding complexity across all of these other challenges. “Inflection point” is an overused term. But this is a moment when, as Burns argued in that essay, it really does fit. Before becoming CIA director, Burns was one of the most highly respected diplomats in recent American history. He started the secret negotiations that led to the Iran nuclear deal. He served as ambassador to Russia. As the State Department’s top Middle East official, he warned internally of the consequences of invading Iraq in 2003. He has spent years sitting across the table from American allies and adversaries, trying to understand what drives them and how Washington should—and should not—deal with them. Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke to Burns on the afternoon of April 1 about the course and consequences of the war in Iran, about Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine, about Xi Jinping and U.S.-Chinese competition, about the future of intelligence, and about what the Trump administration will mean for the future of American power. You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

Just a few weeks after its opening salvos, the war in Iran is already going global. Iran has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, stranding oil tankers and causing energy prices to skyrocket. Donald Trump has asked European partners to help restore freedom of navigation. So far, they have largely rebuffed his requests for military assistance. But as the economic pain mounts, their resolve will surely be tested. Europe’s difficult position is indicative of a dilemma the continent’s leaders have faced since Trump’s return: whether to marshal their resources and will to push back against Trump’s coercion, or to give in to it. In 2025, according to the political scientists Nathalie Tocci and Matthias Matthijs, they chose wrong. “Instead of insisting on bargaining with the United States as an equal partner,” Tocci and Matthijs wrote in a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, Europe “reflexively and consistently adopted a posture of submission.” But this year, Europe seems to have begun to stand up to the United States. In January, it strongly rejected Trump’s posturing over Greenland. Now, with Washington pressuring European countries to support its war on Iran, Europe may have no choice but to assert itself. Deputy Editor Chloe Fox spoke with Tocci and Matthijs on Tuesday, March 24, about the choices facing Europe in the age of Trump. You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.