It was just a few days ago that, after months of saber-rattling by the Trump administration, U.S. forces raided Venezuela and captured its leader, Nicolás Maduro. Already, Trump has suggested that the United States could “run” the country and has demanded a huge stake in Venezuela’s vast oil resources. Maduro, meanwhile, sits in a New York jail, awaiting his next court date in March.

But much remains unclear—about what happens in Venezuela with Maduro gone but his regime largely still in place; how his ouster affects the wider region; and what’s next as the Trump administration flexes its muscles in Latin America.

In this special two-part episode, Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke on the morning of Wednesday, January 7, with two experts on Venezuela seeking to make sense of the situation. First, Phil Gunson, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group who is based in Caracas, explores the dynamics within Venezuela and the prospects for the country’s new president, Delcy Rodríguez. Then, Juan S. Gonzalez, a longtime U.S. policymaker, including a recent stretch overseeing Latin America on the National Security Council, charts the history and near future of U.S. policy on Venezuela. Both make clear how difficult and dangerous the path ahead will be, for Venezuela and for the United States.

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

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.