Should the United States Step Up or Back Off?

For much of the 20th century, the United States has toggled between two foreign policy impulses: to actively insert itself in the affairs of the world or to hang back and focus on its own domestic issues. Advocates of the two approaches to international relations have had various designations, including liberals and realists, or interventionists and isolationists.

But these days, the world is shifting more dramatically than in decades, with the rise of China as a political and economic power and the increasing belligerence of Russia towards its neighbors. With those changes underway, is that old dichotomy still relevant? And what is America’s proper role in the world?

FP Editor in Chief Ravi Agrawal sat down recently with political scientist Stephen Wertheim to discuss these very questions. Wertheim, a senior fellow at the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has written about the issue extensively, including in the pages of Foreign Policy. 

We are featuring their conversation in the last episode of our podcast, Global Reboot. The show is produced by Foreign Policy in partnership with the Doha Forum.

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