The Foreign Affairs Interview

Like the rest of us, China’s leaders are confronting a world in turmoil. They see uncertain American commitments to allies, even as many of those allies ramp up their own defense efforts. They see changing relationships, whether deepening ties between Russia and North Korea or new connections among anxious middle powers. They see American military action in the Middle East and Western Hemisphere,...

The breakneck pace of AI progress and the intensity of the competition for AI supremacy has left U.S. policymakers in a difficult position. They must encourage the innovation needed to ensure an advantage over China and to power economic growth; protect against a national security catastrophe; and assuage the concerns of an anxious and skeptical public. Sebastian Mallaby calls this the “AI trilemm...

The war in Iran may have come to an end, but both the course and the conclusion of that war have brought into sharp relief the forces that increasingly define a world of weaponized power and systemic risk: unconstrained leaders willing to gamble with military force; the search for, and use of, economic leverage; technologies destabilizing both decision-making and development models; and old allian...

The Iran war may be coming to an end, as Washington and Tehran prepare to sign a framework agreement later this week. That deal should reopen the Strait of Hormuz and end the blockade of Iranian ports, even as it leaves unresolved the issues that brought both sides to war in the first place, including the fate of Iran’s nuclear program. But policymakers in Washington and other capitals are just st...

U.S. President Donald Trump has insisted that he will have the “honor of taking Cuba.” Although the administration has not specified what that might mean, following interventions in Venezuela and Iran over the past six months, there is reason to take seriously the possibility of some kind of forceful U.S. action, including military action. Already, a combination of U.S. pressure and the Cuban gove...

Six months ago, Philip Gordon and Mara Karlin wrote an essay in Foreign Affairs about the plight of the United States’ allies in U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term. What was surprising, they argued, was not the administration’s cajoling and threats, or all the ways U.S. policy had called into question the basic principles of these relationships. The surprise was that allies were surprised b...

The world today is more dangerous and more violent than it’s been at any time since 1945. States everywhere have jettisoned commitments to cooperation and opted for aggression. The so-called rules-based order seems to have come apart. Yet the international body founded after World War II with the charge of preventing World War III finds itself increasingly on the margins. In a recent essay in Fore...

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...

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...

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...

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 Securit...

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, thr...

It is an understatement to say that the United States finds itself at a particularly fraught geopolitical juncture. The outcome of the war in Iran is still uncertain. The war in Ukraine continues with no end in sight. Add to that U.S.-Chinese competition, overlapping planetary crises, a highly erratic hegemon—the list could go on. Such an unstable world presents a formidable test for policymakers...

The shockwaves of the ongoing war in Iran are being felt far and wide. The continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz has sparked a global energy crisis, one that could be accentuated by a U.S. naval blockade. Countries as disparate as Chile, South Korea, and Zambia have been forced to take extraordinary measures to deal with shortages and surging prices. But the war’s effects are not just material...

On Tuesday night, as the world held its collective breath, U.S. President Donald Trump announced a temporary cease-fire with Iran, just hours after warning that “a whole civilization will die” if the Iranian regime did not completely open the Strait of Hormuz. In exchange for a cessation of American and Israeli strikes, Iran has agreed to allow oil and other commodities to pass through the strait...

In 2024, when he was the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, William Burns wrote in an essay in Foreign Affairs about “the plastic moments that come along only a few times each century”—and argued that “the United States faces one of those rare moments today, as consequential as the dawn of the Cold War or the post-9/11 period.” If that claim seemed bold at the time, events in the past co...

Just a few weeks after its opening salvos, the war in Iran is already going global. Iran has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, stranding oil tankers and causing energy prices to skyrocket. Donald Trump has asked European partners to help restore freedom of navigation. So far, they have largely rebuffed his requests for military assistance. But as the economic pain mounts, their resolve will...

When the United States and Israel launched a joint war on Iran two weeks ago, U.S. President Donald Trump urged Iranians to rise up and rid themselves of their tyrannical rulers. He seemed buoyed by his success in swiftly removing Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro in January. But the war in Iran has not progressed as smoothly as Trump might have liked. The authoritarian regime that runs the Islam...

For about two weeks, U.S. and Israeli forces have bombarded Iran. They have targeted Iranian military and nuclear sites. They have slain Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and other top Iranian officials. They have even sunk an Iranian vessel deep in the Indian Ocean. Iran has responded by hurling missiles and drones at targets in the Gulf, Israel, and elsewhere in what has become a surprisingly broad an...

Over the weekend, U.S. and Israeli forces struck hundreds of sites across Iran and killed its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Large crowds of Iranians took to the streets, some to mourn, others to celebrate. The Islamic Republic has retaliated and launched strikes of its own across the Middle East.  Much about the joint U.S.-Israeli operation remains unclear—was it meant to eliminate Iran’...

President Donald Trump wields American power like few leaders in U.S. history ever have. By imposing tariffs, threatening territorial conquest, and ordering military intervention, he deploys the United States’ strength to assert dominance over friends and foes alike. Stephen Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard, describes this uniquely Trumpian grand strategy as “predatory hegem...

February 24 marks the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. After Moscow’s initial onslaught, Ukrainian counteroffensives, and slow Russian gains since, the war has settled into a brutal pattern of attrition, adaptation, and endurance. Ukrainian cities are rationing electricity, as the Ukrainian military struggles to muster the manpower and munitions needed to gain a decis...

A year into Donald Trump’s second term, the United States’ allies on both sides of the Atlantic seem to have recognized that they need a new strategy for this age of rupture, as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney called it. Trump’s grab for Greenland, his tit-for-tat tariffs on Canada, his approach in Ukraine—all have opened up rifts between the United States and many of its closest partners. Chr...

In 2024, there were more than 300 million migrants across the world—double the number there were in 1990. Many of those had been displaced by conflict or climate change; many were simply looking for jobs and a better life. But the national and multilateral systems designed to manage these flows have proved grossly inadequate, helping set off political convulsions not just in the United States and...

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney may have made headlines when he described a “rupture” in global order in a speech at Davos last month. But long before that, policymakers and analysts had already been grappling with this unsettled—and unsettling—era in global politics. And the challenge has of course been especially great for American allies facing a very different Washington.    President Alex...