The Foreign Affairs Interview

Xi Jinping's Successor and the Future of China

When Xi Jinping took over the Chinese Communist Party in 2012, he began a new chapter in China’s history—one that would come to be defined above all by his grip on power. Xi overhauled not only the CCP but also China’s economy, military, and role in the world. Yet no matter how secure his power may be—and no matter his recent hot-mic musings about living to 150—what comes after Xi, and how it comes, is an increasingly central question in Chinese politics.
As the political scientists Tyler Jost and Daniel Mattingly wrote recently in Foreign Affairs, “For any authoritarian regime, political succession is a moment of peril . . . and for all its strengths, the CCP is no exception.” And that’s not just a risk for the future. The uncertainty and the jockeying that the succession question spurs is already starting to shape China’s present.
To Jost and Mattingly, there’s more at stake than just the matter of who will follow Xi. They note: “The drama created by a struggle over the succession . . . is unlikely to stay inside China’s borders.” They joined Deputy Editor Chloe Fox to discuss the nature of Xi’s rule, his attempt to define his legacy, and what that will mean for China in the coming months, years, and decades.
You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

Poland’s View From the Frontline of Europe

In early September, around 20 Russian drones entered Poland’s airspace. NATO and Polish forces scrambled fighter jets to shoot them down, but not before several had traveled hundreds of miles into Polish territory. 
To Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, the incursion was not just a test of NATO’s resolve. It was a reminder of the precarious position of the alliance’s frontline states as the war in Ukraine grinds on for its third year, and as Donald Trump upends the basic bargain of the transatlantic alliance.
Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke to Sikorski on the morning of September 24 in New York, where he was attending the UN General Assembly. They discussed the ongoing threat from Russia and what it will take, in Washington and in European capitals, to prevent it from escalating. But more than that, Sikorski is grappling with a moment of sharp change in geopolitics—trying to understand both why the old order collapsed and how to navigate the new order just now taking shape.
You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

Is America Ready for the Age of Cyber Warfare?

In 2024, the U.S. government discovered that Chinese hackers had penetrated a huge swath of the American telecommunications system—and remained there for years. That attack came to be known as Salt Typhoon. China has not only managed to steal the data and surveil the communications of hundreds of millions of Americans. It also embedded itself in the United States’ most important infrastructure, giving Beijing a crucial advantage in a conflict.
Anne Neuberger was until recently the top cybersecurity official on the National Security Council. She was in that position when Salt Typhoon was discovered. And to her, the attack is not just an isolated incident of cyberespionage. Rather, it is evidence of American weakness, and Chinese dominance, in a central arena of national security.
“Decades after the widespread adoption of the Internet opened a new realm of geopolitical contestation,” she writes in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, “the United States has fallen behind, failing to secure a vast digital home front.” Neuberger warns that, as artificial intelligence grows ever more sophisticated, the threat of a cyberattack that could paralyze the country in a time of crisis has never been higher.
You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

The World That Tariffs Will Make

Donald Trump has been railing against the global economic order from the start of his political career. But in his second term as president, he has turned that critique into blistering action. In just five months, the trade war that started with his April tariffs has completely reshaped the global economy—and struck at the very heart of the trade system that emerged after the end of the Cold War.
To Michael Froman, the diagnosis is terminal. Froman, now the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, which publishes Foreign Affairs, served as the U.S. trade representative in the Obama administration. “Even if pieces of the old order manage to survive,” he writes in the new issue of Foreign Affairs, “the damage is done: there is no going back.” Trump’s “America first” trade policy, and China’s analogous strategy, herald a new order of protectionism, unilateralism, and mercantilism.
Froman warns that economic anarchy could ensue. But as he sees it, any hope of resurrecting the corpse of the old order is delusional. “Nostalgia,” he argues, “is not a strategy.” Rather, the task at hand is to build a new “global economy shaped by rules even without a global rules-based system.”
You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

Can Israel Save Itself?

It has been almost two years since Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel and the start of the war in Gaza. Those many months of combat have left Hamas severely weakened, with its leadership eviscerated and its military capabilities crippled. But as the war enters a new phase, with Israeli troops pushing into Gaza City, the central question of the war’s endgame remains unsettled. Israeli leaders have consistently refused to offer a clear vision for the war’s aftermath, for what happens on “the day after.”
According to Ami Ayalon, that failure has been disastrous, for Palestinians as well as for Israelis. It is a recipe for conflict grinding on indefinitely, along with the attendant bloodshed and ongoing humanitarian catastrophe.
Ayalon was the commander of the Israeli Navy and the head of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency. As he sees it, Israel’s long-term security depends on recognizing the rights and aspirations of Palestinians, and the creation of a Palestinian state—one that includes both Gaza and the West Bank. Ayalon joined Senior Editor Eve Fairbanks to reflect on the strategic errors that led to this point and how the world can reckon with those missteps to find a better path forward for both Israelis and Palestinians.
You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

The Rise of the Economic Security State

For decades, the United States has used its position at the center of global financial, commercial, and technological networks to punish adversaries and pressure allies, exploiting what the political scientists Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman call “weaponized interdependence.” Lacking any alternatives, the rest of the world has had no choice but to rely on American payment systems, American technology, and American corporate might, even as Washington turned that reliance to its own strategic advantage.
Now, however, the tables have turned. Other states—starting with China—have begun to weaponize their own chokepoints in the global economic infrastructure. As Farrell and Newman write in the new issue of Foreign Affairs, “The United States is discovering what it is like to have others do unto it as it has eagerly done unto others.” Where it once pioneered the weaponization of interdependence, Washington may now be increasingly at the mercy of its rivals.
To Newman and Farrell, this is more than just another salvo in global competition. It is evidence of a major transformation in geopolitics, as national security and economic power have merged—and ushered in a new era of economic warfare.
You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

Why Is America Going It Alone?

During his second term, Donald Trump has railed against the United States’ closest allies. He has imposed tariffs, threatened to upend security commitments, and openly challenged the borders of Canada, Panama, and Greenland.
Historians often look to the past for insight about the present and future. But although alliances have collapsed for many reasons over past centuries, Margaret MacMillan argues in a recent essay for Foreign Affairs that Trump’s current behavior toward allies has little precedent. His approach, she writes, “does not suggest a clever Machiavellian policy to enhance American power; rather, it shows a United States acting against its own interests in bewildering fashion, undermining one of the key sources of that power.”
A renowned historian and professor emeritus of international history at Oxford University, MacMillan is one of the greatest chroniclers of the grand alliances of the twentieth century and the world wars they fought. She joined Editor-at-Large Hugh Eakin on August 18 to discuss the normalization of conquest and the war in Ukraine, how U.S. allies are calculating their next steps, and what the United States’ approach to its alliances will mean for the future.
You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview. 

Best of: Is the World Ready for the Population Bust?

In an episode released in January 2025, Senior Editor Kanishk Tharoor spoke with the political economist Nicholas Eberstadt about the global crash in fertility rates and the looming prospect of depopulation.
Over the past century, the world’s population has exploded—surging from around one and a half billion people in 1900 to roughly eight billion today. But according to Eberstadt, that chapter of human history is over, and a new era, which he calls the age of depopulation, has begun. That subject has become even more prevalent in the past year. The United States, for example, recorded its lowest ever birthrate in 2024.
Eberstadt is the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute and has written extensively on demographics, economic development, and international security. In a 2024 essay for Foreign Affairs, Eberstadt argued that plummeting fertility rates everywhere from the United States and Europe to India and China point to a new demographic order—one that will transform societies, economies, and geopolitics.
You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview. 

Best Of: What Drives Putin and Xi

In 2023, Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke with the historians Stephen Kotkin and Orville Schell about what drives Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin and how they are (and are not) like Mao and Stalin. 
Xi and Putin loom over geopolitics in a way that few leaders have in decades. Not even Mao and Stalin drove global events the way Xi and Putin do today. Who they are, how they view the world, and what they want are some of the most important and pressing questions in foreign policy and international affairs. 
Kotkin and Schell are two of the best scholars to explore these issues. Kotkin is the author of seminal scholarship on Russia, the Soviet Union, and global history, including an acclaimed three-volume biography of Stalin. He is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Kleinheinz Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Schell is the Arthur Ross director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. He is the author of 15 books, ten of them about China. He is also a former professor and dean at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. 

The Uncertain Future of U.S. Relations With India

In a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, the scholar and former U.S. official Ashley J. Tellis makes a provocative argument about India’s foreign policy. In a piece titled “India’s Great-Power Delusions,” Tellis argues that Indian policymakers have their priorities wrong. Instead of pushing for what they call “multipolarity” in the international system, Indian leaders should align more closely with the United States. Tellis insists that India will be able to fend off China, its far stronger rival in Asia, only with U.S. backing. But it may lose that support if it continues to express skepticism about U.S. leadership and courts U.S. adversaries.
Tellis’s essay has provoked huge debate—in Washington, in New Delhi, and in the pages of Foreign Affairs. In this episode, Dan Kurtz-Phelan brings Tellis into conversation with two of his critics: the former Indian foreign secretary Nirupama Rao and the analyst Dhruva Jaishankar. Kurtz-Phelan spoke with them on July 25, a few days before the Trump administration announced 25 percent tariffs on India, the latest twist in ongoing negotiations with New Delhi over a new trade deal.
Tellis, Rao, and Jaishankar debate India’s pathways to power in the September/October 2025 issue of Foreign Affairs. Their disagreements touch not just on the directions of Indian and U.S. foreign policies but also on the very nature of international order in the twenty-first century.