One of the big surprises of Donald Trump’s second term has been the change in his approach to China. His first term marked the start of what seemed to be a hard-line consensus in Washington. But in the past year, the drivers of Trump’s policy have been much harder to decipher—including for Chinese policymakers. Beijing was prepared to respond forcefully to tough U.S. measures, as it has, most prominently, by wielding its control over rare-earth metals. Yet it has also seen new opportunities to gain ground in its bid for global leadership, as Trump’s focus careens from Latin America to the Middle East to Greenland.

Jonathan Czin has spent his career decoding the power struggles and ideological debates inside the halls of power in Beijing. Now at the Brookings Institution, Czin long served as a top China analyst at the CIA before becoming director for China at the National Security Council. He sees Beijing’s year of aggressive diplomacy as a success, but with a lot of uncertainty about the months ahead. Xi Jinping faces a series of summits with Trump even as he grapples with economic challenges at home and a military that, if recent purges are any indication, is still not to his liking. Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke with Czin about China’s approach to Trump 2.0; what to make of the military purges and other developments in Beijing; and the enduring nature of U.S.-Chinese rivalry, whatever the surprises in the short term.

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

In the past year, Donald Trump has upended the global trading system and used American economic power like no president in recent memory. He’s imposed tariffs to force other countries to fall into line on commercial issues and geopolitical disputes—like this week’s threats against NATO partners over Greenland. He’s called into question the role of the dollar. And at home, he’s attacked the independence of the Federal Reserve and intervened in private-sector decision-making.

Lael Brainard served as director of the National Economic Council in the Biden administration and, before that, as vice chair of the Federal Reserve. Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke to her not about the short-term consequences of Trump’s policies but about what they would mean for U.S. power and prosperity in the long term. Brainard has taken on that question in recent pieces for Foreign Affairs. In this conversation, she stressed not just the risks posed by Trump’s economic agenda but the bigger changes necessary to sustain American economic success into the future.

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

At the end of December, protests erupted across Iran. The government has since cracked down hard with potentially thousands of Iranians killed. It now seems possible that the United States might intervene. Via social media, U.S. President Donald Trump has told Iranian protesters that “help is on the way.” We do not know yet what, if anything, Washington will do. But the repressive regime of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is being pushed to the brink after punishing years of war and sanctions.

Few observers of Iranian politics have thought more deeply about the regime and its future than Karim Sadjadpour. He is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. And he is the author of a recent essay in Foreign Affairs in which he underlines the fragility of the Ayatollah’s regime and explores what might happen after its fall.

Deputy Editor Kanishk Tharoor spoke to Sadjadpour on the morning of January 12 about the upheaval in Iran, the weakness and brutality of the regime, what U.S. intervention can and cannot achieve, and about what kind of political order might emerge in the coming years.

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