In a little more than 100 days, Donald Trump has set about dismantling much of the international order that has prevailed since World War II. That’s true of traditional U.S. approaches to trade, to conflict, alliances, international organizations, and more.
But as much as we focus on Trump, Michael Beckley argues that much of this change in U.S. foreign policy has deeper roots, going to the very nature of American power. The United States is increasingly a “rogue superpower,” Beckley has written, “neither internationalist nor isolationist but aggressive, powerful, and increasingly out for itself.” How this America interacts, not just with adversaries like China but also with allies and others, may be the most important question in geopolitics today.
Beckley is an associate professor of political science at Tufts University, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and Asia director at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and has been one of the sharpest analysts of American grand strategy in an era of deepening great-power competition.
Beckley joined Dan Kurtz-Phelan on May 13 to discuss both the resilience of American power and the risks to it—and what the global transformation now underway will mean for U.S. interests going forward.
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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47:21
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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42:11
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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36:00
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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57:35
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.
Foreign Affairs invites you to join its editor, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, as he talks to influential thinkers and policymakers about the forces shaping the world. Whether the topic is the war in Ukraine, the United States’ competition with China, or the future of globalization, Foreign Affairs’ weekly podcast offers the kind of authoritative commentary and analysis that you can find in the magazine and on the website.
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