The Foreign Affairs Interview

How AI Could Upend Geopolitics

Ever since the company OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT last year, there have been constant warnings about the effects of artificial intelligence on just about everything. 
Ian Bremmer, the founder of the Eurasia Group, and Mustafa Suleyman, founder of the AI companies DeepMind and Inflection AI, highlight what may be the most significant effect in a new essay for Foreign Affairs. They argue that AI will transform power, including the power balance between states and the companies driving the new technology. Policymakers are already behind the curve, they warn, and if they do not catch up soon, it is possible they never will.
You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

What the World Risks if It Abandons Globalization

After World War II, an idea took hold: economic interdependence between countries would help prevent war. But lately, faith in this idea has wavered, and terms like “decoupling,” “friend shoring,” and “de-risking” are dominating the debates around trade in Washington and beyond. 
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, director general of the World Trade Organization, disagrees with key elements of this new consensus. She thinks that policymakers are misdiagnosing the problems that the world faces, and that they risk setting us on a dangerous course—one that could break the global economy and leave the world both less prosperous and less secure. 
We discuss why views on global trade have changed so dramatically in recent years, China’s integration into the global trading system, and what would happen if the world fragmented into two trading blocs. 
You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

The Fault Lines in U.S. Foreign Policy

There’s a near consensus today that U.S. foreign policy has entered a new era. But how to define and navigate this new era is much less clear. 
Richard Fontaine, the CEO of the Center for a New American Security, has held senior positions across the U.S. government—in the Senate, at the State Department and National Security Council, and as an adviser to John McCain, the Republican senator and presidential candidate. There are few people who can offer as informed and comprehensive a view of U.S. foreign policy, especially at a moment when the United States is rethinking its own strategic objectives and sometimes struggling to find new ways of pursuing them.
We discuss the objectives behind the United States’ China policy, democratic backsliding in India, and a potential Republican foreign policy platform. 
Sources:
“Election Interference Demands a Collective Defense” by Richard Fontaine
“The Myth of Neutrality” by Richard Fontaine 
“Washington’s Missing China Strategy” by Richard Fontaine
“The Case Against Foreign Policy Solutionism” by Richard Fontaine
 
If you have feedback, email us at podcast@foreignaffairs.com. 
 
The Foreign Affairs Interview is produced by Kate Brannen, Julia Fleming-Dresser, and Molly McAnany; original music by Robin Hilton. Special thanks to Grace Finlayson, Nora Revenaugh, Caitlin Joseph, Asher Ross, Gabrielle Sierra, and Markus Zakaria. 

How Does the War in Ukraine End?

With the fighting in Ukraine well into its second year, the question of the war’s endgame has become if anything, more complicated. Wagner Chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s short-lived mutiny has raised doubts about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s grip on power. Yet Ukraine’s counteroffensive is not going as well as many had hoped, as Ukrainian forces have yet to make a major breakthrough across heavily defended Russian lines.
In this episode, you can listen to a July 17 conversation with Samuel Charap, Fiona Hill, and Andriy Zagorodnyuk, who joined Foreign Affairs editor Daniel Kurtz-Phelan for a live event. Charap is a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation. Hill is a senior fellow at the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution and the author of There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century. From 2017 to 2019, she was the senior director for Europe and Russia on the U.S. National Security Council. Zagorodnyuk is the former Ukrainian minister of defense and a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council. 
We discuss what’s happening on the battlefield, the state of Putin’s power, and possible endgames to the war.
You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

What Drives Putin and Xi (Part Two)

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir 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. 
Stephen Kotkin and Orville 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. 
In part two of our conversation, which we taped on June 16, we discussed how the leaders of China and Russia see the West and how that worldview is reshaping geopolitics.
You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

What Drives Putin and Xi (Part One)

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir 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. 
Stephen Kotkin and Orville 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. 
In part one of our conversation, we discuss the early lives of Putin and Xi and how history has shaped their worldviews.
You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

What Can History Tell Us About Ukraine’s Future?

Ukraine’s counteroffensive is shaping up to be the biggest military operation in Europe since World War II. As Kyiv works to push back Russian troops, there is a lot of focus on how modern technology including drones and satellite Internet terminals is being deployed. But these new advanced systems aside, the battlefield scenes from Ukraine’s frontlines look like they could be from the western front in 1916. 
For the historian Margaret MacMillan, the resonance of World War I goes well beyond the images coming out of Ukraine. As she writes in a new essay for Foreign Affairs, the experience of that earlier great war in Europe “should remind us of the dreadful costs of a prolonged and bitter armed conflict.”
We discuss how leaders decide to stop fighting, the usefulness of historical analogies, and how the end of one war can lay the groundwork for the next. 
You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

Why Is Rwanda’s Leader Sowing Chaos in Congo?

After the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Paul Kagame was widely seen as a hero—a rebel leader who came to the rescue of his people and helped stop the killing. Over the last 30 years, the Rwandan president has cultivated this vision of himself, and the West has been eager to believe it. 
But for Michela Wrong, a journalist who has covered Africa for decades, cracks in this story became too big to ignore. In her most recent book, Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad, she investigates the 2014 political murder of a former Rwandan spy chief who fled the country after a falling out with Kagame. Her reporting uncovered the true nature of Kagame’s regime, painting a picture of a dictator who will stop at nothing to silence his critics. Now, in a piece for Foreign Affairs, Wrong reports on Kagame’s meddling in eastern Congo and how his support for the M23 rebel group is risking a broader regional conflict.
We discuss her reporting on Kagame, how Rwanda is working to destabilize central Africa today, and why the West is doing so little to stop it.
You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

How Does China Want the War in Ukraine to End?

This week, a top Chinese envoy is traveling across Europe, making stops in Ukraine and Russia. Beijing says that the purpose of the trip is to discuss a “political settlement” to the war. But this diplomatic push raises bigger questions not just about China’s attempt to position itself as a peacemaker but also about the growing closeness of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Bonny Lin is a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. She previously served in the Pentagon, including as country director for China. Alexander Gabuev is the director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, based in Berlin, where he moved after leaving Moscow at the start of the war. 
We discuss the relationship between Putin and Xi, how China has responded to the war in Ukraine, and whether China might provide Russia with lethal aid.
You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

Bonus: The West Versus the Rest

Russia’s war in Ukraine has drawn Western allies closer together, but it has not unified the world’s democracies in the way U.S. President Joe Biden might have hoped for when the war began last February. Instead, the last year has highlighted just how differently much of the rest of the world sees not only the war but also the broader global landscape. 
In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, policymakers and scholars from Africa, Latin America, and South and Southeast Asia explored the dangers, as well as the new opportunities, that the war and the broader return of great-power conflict present for their countries and regions.
In this episode, you can listen to a May 4 conversation between Tim Murithi, Nirupama Rao, Matias Spektor, and Executive Editor Justin Vogt that was part of the Foreign Affairs’ event series. They discuss the issues most important to their regions, the mounting costs of the Ukraine war, and the impact of sharpening geopolitical tensions.
You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.