For years, U.S. presidents have complained that European governments spend far too little on their militaries, leaving the United States to pick up a disproportionate share of the tab for the transatlantic alliance. But in the past few years, Europe’s defense spending has exploded.
At the NATO summit last week, U.S. allies committed to spending five percent of GDP on defense. That’s far more than the two percent target U.S. policymakers long called for. It’s even more than the United States itself spends on defense—the result of both escalating pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump and escalating threats from Russian President Vladimir Putin.
But Celeste Wallander, until recently the top defense official overseeing U.S. policy toward Europe and Russia, warns in a new Foreign Affairs essay that this transformation will have more complicated consequences than most Americans expect. A more capable Europe will also mean a more independent Europe, more willing to defy U.S. priorities and make demands for cooperation.
Wallander has been a key player in the transatlantic alliance as a top official on the National Security Council and in the Pentagon, including as assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs during the Biden administration. She is now executive director of Penn Washington and an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. The United States, in her view, will have to take a very different approach to the transatlantic alliance—at a time when it’s as vital as ever, in Ukraine and beyond.
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 Weak Is Iran?
Donald Trump pledged not to entangle the United States in wars in the Middle East. But last weekend, he joined Israel’s air campaign against Iran, bombing three nuclear sites before claiming that Iranian facilities targeted by U.S. aircraft and missiles had been “obliterated.” Iran responded by firing missiles at U.S. bases in the region just before Washington announced a cease-fire.
But key questions remain unanswered—about the risk of continued fighting, about Iran’s nuclear capability and ambitions going forward, and about the shifting balance of power and rapidly changing regional order in the Middle East.
To make sense of the conflict, Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke with Eric Edelman, Suzanne Maloney, and Andrew Miller. All three have served in senior positions overseeing U.S. Middle East policy in the White House, the State Department, and the Defense Department across multiple administrations. They spoke on June 25 about the war’s escalation and abrupt de-escalation and about its long-reaching consequences—for Iran, for Israel, and for 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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Iran, Israel, and the Middle East in Tumult
Less than a week ago, on June 12, Israel launched a barrage of attacks against Iran, targeting nuclear sites, missile depots, and military and political leaders. Since then, the two countries have exchanged a series of attacks.
Philip Gordon is the Sydney Stein, Jr. Scholar at the Brookings Institution and a longtime observer and analyst of the Middle East, and his writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs for over 20 years. He has also been one of the key practitioners of U.S. Middle East policy, as White House Middle East coordinator during the Obama administration and, more recently, as national security adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris.
Shortly after the start of the Trump administration, Gordon wrote in Foreign Affairs, to the surprise of many, about the opportunity Donald Trump had to make progress in the Middle East. On June 17, he joined Dan Kurtz-Phelan to discuss the dangers of this latest round of escalation—and also how wise U.S. policy could prevent it from ending in catastrophe.
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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What Trump Gets Wrong About the Global Economy
U.S. President Donald Trump famously tweeted during his first term, “Trade wars are good, and easy to win.” But the record of the trade war that Trump started with his so-called Liberation Day tariffs in early April suggests that things are a bit more complicated.
In an essay for Foreign Affairs appropriately titled, “Trade Wars Are Easy to Lose,” the economist Adam Posen argues that the United States has a weaker hand than the Trump administration believes. That’s especially true when it comes to China, the world’s second-largest economy and perhaps the real target of Trump’s trade offensive. “It is China that has escalation dominance in this trade war,” Posen writes. “Washington, not Beijing, is betting all in on a losing hand.”
Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke to Posen, who is president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, on June 9 about the short- and long-term effects of Trump’s tariffs and the economic uncertainty they’ve caused, about what it would take to constructively remake the global economy, and about the growing risks to the United States’ economic position at an especially dangerous time.
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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Another China Is Possible
It has become a trope to lament and lambast the wishful thinking that shaped U.S. policy toward China in the two decades after the Cold War. That policy rested on a prediction about China’s future: that with economic growth and ongoing diplomatic, economic, and cultural engagement—with the United States and the rest of the world—China would become more like the United States—more politically open at home and more accepting of the existing order abroad.
It is hard to deny that this prediction proved wrong. But Rana Mitter, the S.T. Lee Chair in U.S.-Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School and one of the great historians of China, reminds readers that predictions about China almost always prove wrong. And as he writes in a new essay in Foreign Affairs, it would be equally foolish to assume that China must remain on its current trajectory of more confrontation abroad and repression at home. “Another China remains possible,” Mitter argues. And how that China develops will be one of the most important factors in geopolitics for decades to come.
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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