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.

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.

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.

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 [email protected].    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. 

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.