The Foreign Affairs Interview

• Understanding How Trump Sees the World

  Donald Trump’s first National Security Strategy, released at the end of 2017, announced the start of a new era for American foreign policy—one that put great-power competition at its center and focused especially on intensifying rivalry with China. For all the dissension and turbulence in American politics since then, that framework for American foreign policy has proved remarkably durable. Nadia Schadlow is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and served as deputy national security adviser in the first Trump administration. She was the primary author of Trump’s first National Security Strategy and helped crystallize the return of great-power competition as the organizing principle of U.S. strategy. But what great-power competition means for America’s greatest challenges today—and whether it still accurately describes Donald Trump’s view of the world—is an entirely different question. Schadlow joined Dan Kurtz-Phelan to talk about Trump’s second-term approach—in Ukraine, in Asia, with global trade, and more—and laid out a vision of what a successful Trump foreign policy might look like. 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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• Planning for a Post-American Future in Ukraine

  Donald Trump famously promised to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of returning to the White House. But he is just over 100 days into his presidency, and the war is certainly not over. With Kyiv opposed to territorial concessions, and with Russia’s military campaign showing no signs of slowing down, the Trump administration has threatened to walk away from the conflict if both sides don’t agree to a cease-fire and a path to peace—leaving Ukraine and its European partners planning for a future in which Russian aggression continues, but U.S. support does not. In a recent article for Foreign Affairs, Jack Watling, senior research fellow for land warfare at the Royal United Services Institute in London, argues that Europe can, in fact, replace the United States as Ukraine’s primary backer. Senior Editor Hugh Eakin spoke with Watling on April 28 about the latest developments on the battlefield—and what the coming months will demand of Ukraine and its partners in order to avoid a catastrophic defeat. 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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• Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Fix Global Trade

  Donald Trump’s embrace of tariffs should come as no surprise. For decades, he has claimed that other countries are ripping Americans off—and promised to use tariffs to remake a global trade system that, in his view, has been deeply unfair to the United States. But almost no one anticipated a trade and tariff policy as extreme and erratic as the one the world has seen since Trump proclaimed “Liberation Day” at the beginning of April. The sweeping tariffs on U.S. partners and rivals alike unleashed panic in the financial markets and in capitals across the world. Even a pause and negotiations on many of those tariffs has done little to assuage the concerns of foreign leaders, businesses, and consumers, who remain uncertain about the effects of the tariff regime, and the strategy behind it. The economists Kimberly Clausing and Michael Pettis both agree that the global economic system was in need of an overhaul—but they disagree about what that overhaul would look like. For a special two-part episode, Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke with each of them about Trump’s signature economic policy. Clausing, a professor at UCLA, makes the case against Trump’s protectionism and sketches out a progressive blueprint for the global economy. And Pettis, a professor at Peking University in Beijing and a longtime skeptic of the free trade consensus, argues that this reckoning in global trade has been decades in the making—and considers what an alternative economic system could look like. In these separate conversations, they discuss the state of the world economy, the logic behind Trump’s tariff gambit—and whether the U.S. president’s attempt to rewrite the rules will pay off. 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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• Why America Shouldn’t Underestimate Chinese Power

  For years in U.S. foreign policy circles, discussions of China focused on its growing wealth, power, and ambition, and the fear that it would supplant the United States. But a few years ago, the conversation took a sharp turn. Rather than fixating on China’s rise, most analysis began to focus on the country’s stagnation and even decline. There were good reasons for this: disappointing post-COVID economic growth, dire demographics, and a foreign policy alienating much of the world. And so a new consensus took hold—that a weakened China might not overtake the United States after all. In a new essay for Foreign Affairs, Kurt Campbell and Rush Doshi argue that this new consensus dangerously underestimates Chinese power and the challenge it represents for U.S. foreign policy. Washington, they warn, is missing Beijing’s key strategic advantage—an advantage that only a new approach to alliances will offset. As they write, if America goes it alone, “the contest for the next century will be China’s to lose.” Campbell is the chairman and a co-founder of The Asia Group and served as deputy secretary of state and Indo-Pacific coordinator at the National Security Council during the Biden administration. Doshi is an assistant professor at Georgetown University and director of the China Strategy Initiative at the Council on Foreign Relations, and served as deputy senior director for China and Taiwan affairs at the National Security Council during the Biden administration. They joined Dan Kurtz-Phelan on April 14 to discuss the sources of Chinese power, what U.S. observers of China get wrong, and whether the Trump administration has an endgame in its confrontation with Beijing. 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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• How Latin America Can Survive an Age of Turmoil

  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 of his administration, Trump has focused to a surprising degree not just on Mexico and Central America but also on the Panama Canal and Canada and Greenland. There’s even been talk of America’s so-called sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere.  Brian Winter, one of the best chroniclers and analysts of Latin America and the longtime editor of Americas Quarterly, was one of the few people who anticipated this focus—as he did in an essay for Foreign Affairs a few weeks before Trump’s inauguration. As Trump unleashes a whirlwind of confrontational policies across the globe—his sweeping tariffs being just the latest example—Latin American leaders are developing their own approach to this challenge. And in Winter’s view, they may be surprisingly well positioned to weather the storm better than their counterparts anywhere else. He spoke with Dan Kurtz-Phelan on April 8 about how leaders everywhere from Argentina and Brazil to Mexico and Central America are navigating this new reality—and also about whether Latin America’s long tradition of strongman leadership has now come to the United States. 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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