The Foreign Affairs Interview

Putin’s Cannon Fodder

In Ukraine, where war with Russia grinds on, the dominant question has become: can one side outlast the other? This is especially true as both sides face another grueling winter. 
One thing Russia has in ample supply is men. But how it treats its soldiers is having an effect on the battlefield, explains Dara Massicot, who has studied the Russian military for years, first at the U.S. Defense Department and later at RAND and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.  
Foreign Affairs Deputy Editor Kate Brannen sat down with her to discuss how the human dimension of this war provides clues about where it might be headed next. 
You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

Turmoil in the Middle East

Two weeks ago, there was reason to think that the Middle East was becoming more stable than it had been for years. Washington was pushing for normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia as one piece of a broader attempt to reduce the U.S. role in the region and focus on other priorities. Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7 shattered those hopes. 
But there had long been signs that all was not well—that key assumptions underlying U.S. strategy were on shaky ground. In the months before the attacks, Suzanne Maloney and Marc Lynch saw the lights flashing red. Maloney is vice president of the Brookings Institution and director of its Foreign Policy program. Lynch is a professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University. As they watched the region over the past several months, both worried that another crisis was coming.
You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

An Expelled Journalist Returns to China

In March 2020, as COVID-19 spread across the globe, the Chinese government expelled a handful of U.S. journalists from China. The move came weeks after the Trump administration curtailed the number of Chinese citizens who could work in the United States for state-run Chinese news organizations. Among the journalists forced to leave China was Ian Johnson, who had been living there for 20 years.  
This spring, Johnson finally returned to China. While he was there, he spoke to a cross section of Chinese people—not only scholars and officials but also small business owners, bus drivers, students, and nuns. Some were people he’d known for years. 
What he found was grim—a country in a state of stagnation and turning inward. Its leader, Xi Jinping, seemed so intent on control and so obsessed with security that no price was too high. Yet, under the surface, Johnson found there may be more dissent than most observers realize—a phenomenon he explores in his new book, Sparks: China's Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future.
You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

Will India Take America’s Side Against China?

Building closer ties with India has become a top priority for U.S. foreign policy. In June, the White House hosted Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for a lavish state dinner. The thinking is that India will be a key U.S. partner in its competition with China. But is Washington making the wrong assumptions about India? How far do the two countries’ interests diverge when it comes to Beijing?
Ashley Tellis has been one of the closest observers and shapers of the U.S.-Indian relationship. He served in senior positions in the U.S. embassy in New Delhi and on the National Security Council under President George W. Bush. Today, he is the Tata Chair for Strategic Affairs and a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
In an interview earlier this month, Tellis warned that Washington needs to be more clear-eyed about Indian interests—understanding that they do not always align with those of the United States.
You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/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.