The biggest questions in U.S. foreign policy today tend to be about China. Policymakers and analysts argue over the implications of China’s rise, the extent of its ambitions, the nature of its economic influence, and the meaning of its growing military strength. Underlying these arguments is a widespread sense that where Beijing once seemed likely to slot comfortably into a U.S.-led international order, it now poses a profound challenge to American interests.

No one brings more perspective to these arguments than the historian Odd Arne Westad. In a series of essays in Foreign Affairs over the past few years, Westad has explored the drivers of China’s foreign policy, its approach to global power, and its fraught ties with the United States. He sees in the long arc of Chinese and global history a stark warning about the potential for conflict, including a war between China and the United States.

But Westad also sees in this history lessons for policymakers today about how to avert such an outcome. Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke to Westad about China’s complicated past, about how that history is defining its role as a great power, and about the paths both to war and to peace in the years ahead.

You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

The world has reached various inflection points, or so we are often told. Advanced technology, such as artificial intelligence, promises to transform our way of life. In geopolitics, the growing competition between China and the United States heralds an uncertain new era. And within many democracies, the old assumptions that undergirded politics are in doubt; liberalism appears to be in disarray and illiberal forces on the rise.

Few scholars are grappling with the many dimensions of the current moment quite like Daron Acemoglu is. “The world is in the throes of a pervasive crisis,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs in 2023, a crisis characterized by widening economic inequalities and a breakdown in public trust. Acemoglu is a Nobel Prize–winning economist, but his research and writing has long strayed beyond the conventional bounds of his discipline. He has written famously, in the bestselling book Why Nations Fail, about how institutions determine the success of countries. He has explored how technological advances have transformed—or indeed failed to transform—societies. And more recently he has turned his attention to the crisis facing liberal democracy, one accentuated by economic alienation and the threat of technological change.

Deputy Editor Kanishk Tharoor spoke with Acemoglu about a stormy world of overlapping crises and about how the ship of liberal democracy might be steered back on course.

You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

Last week, the Trump administration released its National Security Strategy. Such documents are usually fairly staid exercises in lofty rhetoric. Not this one. It harshly rebukes the strategies of prior administrations, highlighting what Trump’s team sees as the failures of traditional foreign policy elites. It pointedly criticizes Washington’s traditional allies in Europe and fixates on security issues in the Western Hemisphere, but it has little to say about American rivals such as China and Russia. In recent weeks, the administration has provided a demonstration of what its strategy looks like in practice, launching controversial strikes against boats allegedly trafficking drugs in the Caribbean and mulling military intervention in Venezuela, while also putting the trade war with China on hold and pushing for a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine.

To Kori Schake, this approach represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the means and ends of American power. Now a senior fellow and director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, Schake served on the National Security Council and in the State Department in the George W. Bush administration, and she has become one of Trump’s sharpest critics. What she sees from the administration is “solipsism masquerading as strategy,” as she put it in her most recent piece for Foreign Affairs.

Schake argues that the administration’s actions—and the worldview undergirding them—are based on “faulty assumptions” with potentially dire consequences: a United States hostile to its longtime allies, a brewing civil-military crisis at home, and a world order that could leave Washington behind.

You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.