The Foreign Affairs Interview

When Donald Trump praises foreign dictators—from Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un to Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin—the typical reaction is shock and dismay. But in fact, Beverly Gage points out in a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, such admiration is not uncommon in American politics. And Trump’s embrace of overseas autocrats is just one of the unsettling features of American civic life today that has a more prominent place in U.S. history than most observers would like to think.

Gage, a historian at Yale, has written extensively about contemporary U.S. politics, ideology, and social movements, and is the author of G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century. She spoke with Foreign Affairs senior editor Kanishk Tharoor on October 17 about the historical parallels that help us understand today’s fraught politics—as well as what set this moment apart.

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

Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 U.S. presidential election comes at a moment of turbulence for global democracy. It’s been a year marked by almost universal backlash against incumbent leaders by voters apparently eager to express their anger with the status quo—and also an era when liberalism has been in retreat, if not in crisis.

Francis Fukuyama, a political scientist at Stanford University, has done as much as anyone to elucidate the currents shaping and reshaping global politics. He wrote The End of History and the Last Man , a seminal work of post–Cold War political theory, more than three decades ago. And in the years since, he has written a series of influential essays for Foreign Affairs and other publications.

He joins Editor Dan Kurtz-Phelan to consider what Trump’s return to the presidency means for liberal democracy—and whether its future, in the United States and around the world, is truly at stake.

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

As the U.S. presidential election swings into high gear, speculation about a second-term Trump foreign policy is also becoming more intense. Would he push radical changes to policy on China, or Ukraine, or the war in Gaza? Can his campaign promises be taken at face value? Would he be reined in—by staff, Congress, or his own aversion to risk?

Kori Schake has been one of Trump’s fiercest critics among Republican foreign policy hands. Schake is a senior fellow and director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of Safe Passage: The Transition From British to American Hegemony. She served on the National Security Council and in the U.S. State Department under President George W. Bush. Yet even while warning of the consequences of a second Trump term, she shares the view that U.S. foreign policy needs to change—to align with what she calls a new conservative internationalism that would invest in American strength without neglecting the rest of the world.

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

In just a few short years, the United States’ China policy has undergone nothing short of a revolution. Few people have been more central to that shift than Matt Pottinger. He was a reporter in China for Reuters and The Wall Street Journal, then a U.S. Marine, deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan. He went on to become the top policymaker on Asia and the deputy national security adviser in the Trump administration.

Pottinger argues in a new essay for Foreign Affairs that even though Washington’s China strategy has already gotten much tougher, it still has a ways to go—to take on more risk and lay out a clear, if radical, goal for the kind of China the United States wants to see. His views are a window into what China policy might look like if Donald Trump returns to the White House.

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

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.