The Foreign Affairs Interview

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin loom over geopolitics in a way that few leaders have in decades. Not even Mao and Stalin drove global events the way Xi and Putin do today. Who they are, how they view the world, and what they want are some of the most important and pressing questions in foreign policy and international affairs.  Stephen Kotkin and Orville Schell are two of the best scholars to explore these issues. Kotkin is the author of seminal scholarship on Russia, the Soviet Union, and global history, including an acclaimed three-volume biography of Stalin. He is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Kleinheinz Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Schell is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. He is the author of 15 books, ten of them about China. He is also a former professor and dean at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.  In part two of our conversation, which we taped on June 16, we discussed how the leaders of China and Russia see the West and how that worldview is reshaping geopolitics. You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin loom over geopolitics in a way that few leaders have in decades. Not even Mao and Stalin drove global events the way Xi and Putin do today. Who they are, how they view the world, and what they want are some of the most important and pressing questions in foreign policy and international affairs.  Stephen Kotkin and Orville Schell are two of the best scholars to explore these issues. Kotkin is the author of seminal scholarship on Russia, the Soviet Union, and global history, including an acclaimed three-volume biography of Stalin. He is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Kleinheinz Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Schell is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. He is the author of 15 books, ten of them about China. He is also a former professor and dean at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.  In part one of our conversation, we discuss the early lives of Putin and Xi and how history has shaped their worldviews. You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

Ukraine’s counteroffensive is shaping up to be the biggest military operation in Europe since World War II. As Kyiv works to push back Russian troops, there is a lot of focus on how modern technology including drones and satellite Internet terminals is being deployed. But these new advanced systems aside, the battlefield scenes from Ukraine’s frontlines look like they could be from the western front in 1916.  For the historian Margaret MacMillan, the resonance of World War I goes well beyond the images coming out of Ukraine. As she writes in a new essay for Foreign Affairs, the experience of that earlier great war in Europe “should remind us of the dreadful costs of a prolonged and bitter armed conflict.” We discuss how leaders decide to stop fighting, the usefulness of historical analogies, and how the end of one war can lay the groundwork for the next.  You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

After the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Paul Kagame was widely seen as a hero—a rebel leader who came to the rescue of his people and helped stop the killing. Over the last 30 years, the Rwandan president has cultivated this vision of himself, and the West has been eager to believe it.  But for Michela Wrong, a journalist who has covered Africa for decades, cracks in this story became too big to ignore. In her most recent book, Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad, she investigates the 2014 political murder of a former Rwandan spy chief who fled the country after a falling out with Kagame. Her reporting uncovered the true nature of Kagame’s regime, painting a picture of a dictator who will stop at nothing to silence his critics. Now, in a piece for Foreign Affairs, Wrong reports on Kagame’s meddling in eastern Congo and how his support for the M23 rebel group is risking a broader regional conflict. We discuss her reporting on Kagame, how Rwanda is working to destabilize central Africa today, and why the West is doing so little to stop it. You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

This week, a top Chinese envoy is traveling across Europe, making stops in Ukraine and Russia. Beijing says that the purpose of the trip is to discuss a “political settlement” to the war. But this diplomatic push raises bigger questions not just about China’s attempt to position itself as a peacemaker but also about the growing closeness of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping. Bonny Lin is a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. She previously served in the Pentagon, including as country director for China. Alexander Gabuev is the director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, based in Berlin, where he moved after leaving Moscow at the start of the war.  We discuss the relationship between Putin and Xi, how China has responded to the war in Ukraine, and whether China might provide Russia with lethal aid. You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

Russia’s war in Ukraine has drawn Western allies closer together, but it has not unified the world’s democracies in the way U.S. President Joe Biden might have hoped for when the war began last February. Instead, the last year has highlighted just how differently much of the rest of the world sees not only the war but also the broader global landscape.  In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, policymakers and scholars from Africa, Latin America, and South and Southeast Asia explored the dangers, as well as the new opportunities, that the war and the broader return of great-power conflict present for their countries and regions. In this episode, you can listen to a May 4 conversation between Tim Murithi, Nirupama Rao, Matias Spektor, and Executive Editor Justin Vogt that was part of the Foreign Affairs’ event series. They discuss the issues most important to their regions, the mounting costs of the Ukraine war, and the impact of sharpening geopolitical tensions. You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

As the Biden administration continues to provide massive amounts of military and economic support to Ukraine, it also has its eyes on China. What will it take to deter Beijing from attempting to seize Taiwan someday? What is the best strategy to avoid a great-power conflict? How can the United States maintain its technological edge on the battlefield?  These are the questions that occupy the Pentagon’s leadership, including U.S. Army General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Before becoming chairman, the president’s top military adviser, he served as chief of staff of the U.S. Army. He has deployed all over the world, including multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.  We discuss the battlefield dynamics in Ukraine, how concern over escalation has shaped Western support for Kyiv, and how the United States can avoid a great-power war in the future.  You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

There seems to be an unstoppable march toward the automation of work, including the checkout at the supermarket, the seemingly limitless possibilities of ChatGPT, and so much else. What is driving this push toward automation? For one, labor scarcity in developed countries. But Lant Pritchett, a development economist, argues in a new piece for Foreign Affairs that instead of choosing machines over people and funneling resources into job-killing technologies, countries should work to let people move to where they are needed. Pritchett is the research director of Labor Mobility Partnerships, the RISE research director at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford, and a former World Bank economist. We discuss why automation is a policy choice rather than an inevitable force and how it is contributing to poverty levels across the globe. You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

Even for an autocrat like Russian President Vladimir Putin, waging war depends on the acceptance—if not the support—of his people. Despite the disastrous start to his invasion of Ukraine, and with Moscow facing battlefield losses and mounting casualties, Russian approval of the war remains remarkably high. Maria Lipman, a Russian journalist and political scientist who fled her country when the war began, explains why Russian support for the war remains so strong—and what Putin is doing to keep it that way. He “has used the war to clamp down on Russian society, to pull elites even closer to him, and to shore up his domestic position,” Lipman writes in a January essay with Michael Kimmage.   We discuss the strength of Putin’s regime, how the war in Ukraine has shaped Putin’s relationship with the Russian people, and what outcomes of the war the Russian public would possibly accept. You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

The 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq has prompted a wave of reflection on the war: how and why it began, where it went wrong, and how it continues to haunt the Middle East and burden American leadership. In a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, “What the Neocons Got Wrong,” Max Boot does some of this painful reflection. In 2003, Boot was a prominent neoconservative voice making the case for war. Today, Boot is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of several books, including The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam and The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right.  In a conversation with Foreign Affairs Executive Editor Justin Vogt, he looks back with regret at the flawed assumptions that shaped his thinking—and considers the troubling lessons for American foreign policy today. You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.