The Foreign Affairs Interview

Both of Donald Trump’s presidential administrations have prompted sharp debates about the direction of U.S. foreign policy. But how to discern a strategic logic behind Washington’s approach, and whether it’s even possible to do so, have been particularly vexing questions since Trump returned to the White House.

A. Wess Mitchell helped shape these debates as assistant secretary of state in Trump’s first term, and he has been uniquely interested in shedding light on them since, including in a number of essays for Foreign Affairs. Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke to Mitchell on Monday, May 18, about how he understands the strategy driving Trump’s second-term foreign policy, and where, after Trump’s meeting with Xi Jinping and with wars in Iran and Ukraine far from settled, he thinks that strategy should go from here.

Orville Schell may be the United States’ greatest chronicler and observer of several decades of U.S.-Chinese relations. Foreign Affairs was extremely lucky to have him in Beijing this week for the summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping. It was not the first time Schell has had a front-row seat at a meeting of U.S. and Chinese leaders. Editor Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke to him on Friday, May 15, about how he read the interactions between Xi and Trump, what they did—and did not—say about the hardest and most dangerous issues in the U.S.-Chinese relationship, and how this could mark an inflection point for the two countries.

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

Not long ago, it was practically a truism to say that a hard line on China was the only real bipartisan position in American foreign policy. To the extent such a consensus ever existed, Donald Trump has upended it in his second term—leaving considerable uncertainty about just what he wants to achieve when he travels to China to meet with Xi Jinping this week, and what Xi hopes to achieve in return.

To make sense of how the Chinese are approaching the summit and the options U.S. policymakers have at their disposal, Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke to Nicholas Burns, a longtime American diplomat who served as ambassador to China until January of 2025.

In this special bonus episode recorded on Thursday, May 7, Burns discusses the issues that will take center stage when Trump meets Xi—from trade and technology to Iran, Taiwan, and Ukraine—and the enormous stakes for U.S.-Chinese competition going forward.

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

Fiona Hill has spent her career trying to understand—and, in one case, advise— leaders with grandiose ambitions, high risk tolerance, and an unshakeable sense of themselves as world-historic figures. She has been a close observer of Vladimir Putin for decades, as a scholar and a member of the U.S. intelligence community. In Donald Trump’s first term, she was a senior member of the National Security Council before becoming a household name during Trump’s first impeachment, for testifying about his relationship with Putin and with Volodymyr Zelensky.

Now, Hill is watching as Trump and Putin, as well as Xi Jinping and others, upend global order, and policymakers everywhere try to navigate the most turbulent period in recent memory—while the rest of the world tries to discern what might come in its wake.

Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke to Hill on the morning of Tuesday, May 5, about the wars in Ukraine and Iran, the predicament faced by American allies, and what Trump’s second-term foreign policy 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.

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.