The Foreign Affairs Interview

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 ...

Two months into U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term, the U.S.-Chinese relationship—the most consequential one in the world by a long stretch—faces new uncertainty. Trump has threatened larger tariffs as China has continued its military buildup and activities in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea. But Trump has also focused his ire on allied capitals, rather than on Beijing, and talked about making a deal with his “very goo...

Not even two months into his second term, U.S. President Donald Trump is reshaping U.S.-Russian relations at a critical juncture for the war in Ukraine. As Russian President Vladimir Putin presses his advantage on the battlefield, Trump’s admiration for the Russian leader, and his push for warmer relations with Moscow, is raising alarms across European capitals—in Kyiv most of all.

Fiona Hill spent years studying Putin and Russia a...

After three years of war, Ukraine is facing intense pressure from Donald Trump to reach a settlement with Russia. Trump has engaged directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin while calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a dictator. His administration has sidelined European allies while joining a handful of Russian partners in voting against a UN resolution condemning Putin’s aggression. And U.S. officials have pressured...

A month into U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term in office, many are alarmed by what they see as emerging signs of democratic erosion. In a new essay, called “The Path to American Authoritarianism,” the scholars Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way make the case that such alarm is justified—that the administration’s early moves could herald an irreversible transformation of the U.S. political system, with major implications for glob...

From record-low unemployment to strong GDP growth, the Biden administration presided over what appeared to be a strong economic recovery in the aftermath of the pandemic. But these measures masked a more complex reality, argues Jason Furman in a new essay in Foreign Affairs. That reality, in his view, should reshape debates about economic strategies going forward.

Furman, now Aetna Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy at Ha...

After nearly three years of war, the mood among many of Ukraine’s allies has turned grim. Russian forces are making steady gains; Kyiv is running low on ammunition; and the return of Donald Trump to the White House has only added to anxieties about the conflict, casting doubt over not only the future of American military aid, but also the prospect of a negotiated settlement that is satisfactory to Ukraine.

In an essay for Foreign A...

With Donald Trump about to return to the White House, leaders around the world are bracing for what could be a significant realignment in U.S. foreign policy—and trying to prepare their own country’s response.

In a special two-part episode, Foreign Affairs Editor Dan Kurtz-Phelan speaks with two policymakers who have grappled directly with the disruption that may come in Trump 2.0. Malcolm Turnbull, who was Australia’s prime minist...

The United States’ relationship with China has scarcely been so contentious. Over the last several years, the two powers have butted heads over issues including trade and technology, Russia’s war on Ukraine, and Beijing’s belligerence in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait. Nicholas Burns has helped oversee Washington’s response to these rising tensions.

Burns has served as U.S. ambassador to China since 2022, the capstone of...

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 the political economist Nicholas Eberstadt, that chapter of human history is over, and a new era, which he calls the age of depopulation, has begun. 

Eberstadt is the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute and has written extensivel...

In the four years since U.S. President Joe Biden took office, the geopolitical landscape has radically changed. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine brought war back to Europe. Hamas’s October 7 assault on Israel sparked a widening conflict in an already chaotic Middle East. And Chinese aggression in the Taiwan Strait has refocused attention on the Indo-Pacific as a possible theater of combat.

Through it all, Secretary of State Antony Blin...

Over the last few years, the world has seen the outbreak of a kind of war that had long seemed like a thing of the past. There was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; a Gaza war that threatened to turn into a full Middle Eastern war, and in many ways did; growing dangers in the Taiwan Strait or South China Sea; and tremendously damaging fighting in places like Sudan that get much less global attention. 

Mara Karlin, a scholar of war as w...

Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 U.S. presidential election comes at a moment of turbulence for global democracy. It’s been a year marked by almost universal backlash against incumbent leaders by voters apparently eager to express their anger with the status quo—and also an era when liberalism has been in retreat, if not in crisis.

Francis Fukuyama, a political scientist at Stanford University, has done as much as anyone to eluci...

Earlier this week, Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris in the U.S. presidential election, ushering in a new era of uncertainty at home and abroad.

In a special bonus episode, Foreign Affairs Editor Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke with Daniel Drezner and Kori Schake on Wednesday, November 6, about what the world might expect from a second Trump term—on everything from wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, to China and alliances, to trade and ...

If there’s a thread that connects unsettling trends across domestic and international affairs today, it’s the return of forms of violence that we once thought were more or less obsolete. That’s true of the return of political violence in the United States. It’s also true of the ongoing wars in Gaza and Ukraine.

Robert Pape is a political scientist at the University of Chicago and the founding director of the Chicago Project on Secu...

When Donald Trump praises foreign dictators—from Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un to Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin—the typical reaction is shock and dismay. But in fact, Beverly Gage points out in a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, such admiration is not uncommon in American politics. And Trump’s embrace of overseas autocrats is just one of the unsettling features of American civic life today that has a more prominent place in U.S. his...

A year has passed since Hamas’s October 7 assault on Israel sparked a brutal war in Gaza—one that is now spreading north into Lebanon and threatening to reel in bigger powers, including the United States.

But the war has always been bigger than Israel and Hamas, writes Ari Shavit in a new essay for Foreign Affairs. In his view, and the view of many Israelis, the main threat—not only to Israel but also to the free world—is Iran, bac...

The world Americans face today is more complicated—and dangerous—than it has been for decades. Yet there is a growing, and in many ways understandable, desire to turn inward—a sense that there is little U.S. foreign policy can do to solve problems abroad and lots it can do to make them worse.

Condoleezza Rice, director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, argues against this impulse in a new essay in Foreign Affairs. G...

The United States is grappling with two of the biggest challenges it has ever faced: the rise of China and the threat of catastrophic climate change.

At home, the Biden administration has forged a green industrial policy that could transform the U.S. economy. But as China threatens to dominate the global market for clean energy, it is not enough to invest domestically, Brian Deese argues in a new Foreign Affairs essay.

Deese has be...