Donald Trump famously promised to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of returning to the White House. But he is just over 100 days into his presidency, and the war is certainly not over.

With Kyiv opposed to territorial concessions, and with Russia’s military campaign showing no signs of slowing down, the Trump administration has threatened to walk away from the conflict if both sides don’t agree to a cease-fire and a path to peace—leaving Ukraine and its European partners planning for a future in which Russian aggression continues, but U.S. support does not.

In a recent article for Foreign Affairs, Jack Watling, senior research fellow for land warfare at the Royal United Services Institute in London, argues that Europe can, in fact, replace the United States as Ukraine’s primary backer.

Senior Editor Hugh Eakin spoke with Watling on April 28 about the latest developments on the battlefield—and what the coming months will demand of Ukraine and its partners in order to avoid a catastrophic defeat.

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

Donald Trump’s embrace of tariffs should come as no surprise. For decades, he has claimed that other countries are ripping Americans off—and promised to use tariffs to remake a global trade system that, in his view, has been deeply unfair to the United States. But almost no one anticipated a trade and tariff policy as extreme and erratic as the one the world has seen since Trump proclaimed “Liberation Day” at the beginning of April.

The sweeping tariffs on U.S. partners and rivals alike unleashed panic in the financial markets and in capitals across the world. Even a pause and negotiations on many of those tariffs has done little to assuage the concerns of foreign leaders, businesses, and consumers, who remain uncertain about the effects of the tariff regime, and the strategy behind it.

The economists Kimberly Clausing and Michael Pettis both agree that the global economic system was in need of an overhaul—but they disagree about what that overhaul would look like.

For a special two-part episode, Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke with each of them about Trump’s signature economic policy. Clausing, a professor at UCLA, makes the case against Trump’s protectionism and sketches out a progressive blueprint for the global economy. And Pettis, a professor at Peking University in Beijing and a longtime skeptic of the free trade consensus, argues that this reckoning in global trade has been decades in the making—and considers what an alternative economic system could look like.

In these separate conversations, they discuss the state of the world economy, the logic behind Trump’s tariff gambit—and whether the U.S. president’s attempt to rewrite the rules will pay off.

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

For years in U.S. foreign policy circles, discussions of China focused on its growing wealth, power, and ambition, and the fear that it would supplant the United States.

But a few years ago, the conversation took a sharp turn. Rather than fixating on China’s rise, most analysis began to focus on the country’s stagnation and even decline. There were good reasons for this: disappointing post-COVID economic growth, dire demographics, and a foreign policy alienating much of the world. And so a new consensus took hold—that a weakened China might not overtake the United States after all.

In a new essay for Foreign Affairs, Kurt Campbell and Rush Doshi argue that this new consensus dangerously underestimates Chinese power and the challenge it represents for U.S. foreign policy. Washington, they warn, is missing Beijing’s key strategic advantage—an advantage that only a new approach to alliances will offset. As they write, if America goes it alone, “the contest for the next century will be China’s to lose.”

Campbell is the chairman and a co-founder of The Asia Group and served as deputy secretary of state and Indo-Pacific coordinator at the National Security Council during the Biden administration. Doshi is an assistant professor at Georgetown University and director of the China Strategy Initiative at the Council on Foreign Relations, and served as deputy senior director for China and Taiwan affairs at the National Security Council during the Biden administration. They joined Dan Kurtz-Phelan on April 14 to discuss the sources of Chinese power, what U.S. observers of China get wrong, and whether the Trump administration has an endgame in its confrontation with Beijing.

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