The Foreign Affairs Interview

If there’s a thread that connects unsettling trends across domestic and international affairs today, it’s the return of forms of violence that we once thought were more or less obsolete. That’s true of the return of political violence in the United States. It’s also true of the ongoing wars in Gaza and Ukraine. Robert Pape is a political scientist at the University of Chicago and the founding director of the Chicago Project on Security & Threats. He has made a career of studying these types of violence—whether carried out by American extremists, by suicide bombers, or by Russian or Israeli fighter jets. In a series of pieces in Foreign Affairs, he explains why all of these phenomena are likely to endure—including, in the wake of the U.S. presidential election, with what he calls an era of violent populism here at home. He spoke with Foreign Affairs editor Dan Kurtz-Phelan on October 30 about the resurgence of these forms of violence—and the consequences for the United States and the world. You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/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.

A year has passed since Hamas’s October 7 assault on Israel sparked a brutal war in Gaza—one that is now spreading north into Lebanon and threatening to reel in bigger powers, including the United States. But the war has always been bigger than Israel and Hamas, writes Ari Shavit in a new essay for Foreign Affairs. In his view, and the view of many Israelis, the main threat—not only to Israel but also to the free world—is Iran, backed by Russia and China.  Shavit, a leading Israeli writer, has spent decades trying to make sense of Israel's identity, democracy, and role in the Middle East. He is the author of My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel and Existential War: From Disaster to Victory to Resurrection. Foreign Affairs Editor Daniel Kurtz-Phelan spoke with him on October 4 about how Israelis are thinking about the conflict as it enters its second year—and what it will take to bring about peace. You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview. 

The world Americans face today is more complicated—and dangerous—than it has been for decades. Yet there is a growing, and in many ways understandable, desire to turn inward—a sense that there is little U.S. foreign policy can do to solve problems abroad and lots it can do to make them worse. Condoleezza Rice, director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, argues against this impulse in a new essay in Foreign Affairs. Great powers, she writes, don’t get to just mind their own business.  Rice served as national security adviser and secretary of state in the George W. Bush administration. Much of what she grappled with then—Russia’s invasion of a neighbor, military collisions with China, the last major clash between Israel and Hezbollah—has worrying echoes now, especially as conflict in the Middle East threatens to spiral into a wider war. You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.