The Crack-Up of American Democracy

If one thing can be said to characterize the first months of Donald Trump’s second term, it is his expansive and often norm-breaking use of presidential power, both abroad and at home. There are the lethal strikes on boats alleged to be smuggling drugs; the range of tariffs he’s imposed; the way he’s gone after enemies, withheld funds, and restructured the federal workforce; the list could go on. Trump has disregarded constraint after constraint on the power of the executive, and many of the forces expected to check that power—in the courts, in Congress, in the private sector or media—have shown little ability or willingness to do so. In the early weeks of Trump’s second term, Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar wrote an essay in Foreign Affairs called “How to Survive a Constitutional Crisis.” Cuéllar, a former justice on the California Supreme Court who now serves as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, looked at Trump’s early moves and tried to lay out a framework for understanding which of them represented just radical shifts in policy, and which of them posed a threat to the very foundations of the American system. Cuéllar believes that the country’s courts, its system of federalism, and its independent media can still provide meaningful checks on presidential power. But time is of the essence, he warns, before these pillars of American democracy could start to crack. You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview. 

With a cease-fire in place in Gaza after two years of war, Donald Trump has proclaimed the arrival of peace in the Middle East. At the moment, however, it’s not even clear if the cease-fire itself will hold, let alone whether there’s a viable path to a long-term solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Few are more familiar with the elusiveness of peace in that conflict than Robert Malley. He has served as a senior Middle East official in American administrations going back to the 1990s. He has sat across from Israeli and Palestinian leaders at moments of great optimism and, more often, greater disappointment. And in a recent piece for Foreign Affairs, drawing on a new book co-authored with Hussein Agha, Malley argues that the cause of that disappointment is Washington’s dogged insistence on a two-state solution that neither Israelis nor Palestinians really want. Years of folly, Malley and Agha argue, have seen the United States claim “success even as its efforts yielded serial disaster.”  Malley offers a harsh indictment of decades of U.S. Middle East policy—a policy that, in his assessment, has done more to destabilize and inflame the region than contribute to a lasting peace. Editor Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke with him about America’s record in the Middle East, the devastation of the war in Gaza, and what could perhaps rise from the wreckage. You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview. 

The world has watched as a cease-fire has tentatively taken effect in Gaza. All the surviving Israeli hostages are home and many Palestinian prisoners and detainees have been released. Israeli forces have pulled back within Gaza, and much-needed humanitarian aid is rushing in. Phase One of Donald Trump’s 20-point plan seems to be working. But what happens next is more uncertain. At the time of this recording, conditions on the ground were still in flux, as the difficulty of Phase Two came into focus. The thornier details of who will govern Gaza and provide security there remain to be determined. Nor is it clear whether Hamas will actually disarm, as Trump’s plan calls the group to do. Most of Gaza is in ruins and many Palestinians fear that the cease-fire will only be a pause before a resumption of the conflict.   Shira Efron, Khaled Elgindy, and Daniel Shapiro have closely analyzed the war and its regional and global implications for Foreign Affairs over the last two years. All three are intimately familiar with the challenges of making peace in the Middle East: Efron, the distinguished chair for Israel Policy at the RAND Corporation, has advised Israeli security officials. Elgindy, a visiting scholar at Georgetown University, counseled Palestinian negotiators from 2004 to 2009. And Shapiro, a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council, served as U.S. ambassador to Israel during the Obama administration and as deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East during the Biden administration. Executive Editor Justin Vogt spoke with Efron, Elgindy, and Shapiro on the afternoon of Tuesday, October 14, to make sense of Trump’s deal and the Gaza cease-fire—its promise, its fragility, and its potential pitfalls. You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

Ever since Russia started its war in Ukraine, assessments of its military power have vacillated wildly. First, Russian forces were supposed to overrun Ukraine and crush any resistance in a matter of days. Then, they were thought to be so weak that a Ukrainian counteroffensive or a new capability might cause them to collapse altogether. Now, with the war in its fourth year, and Donald Trump’s return to office bringing uncertainty about Western support, it has started to seem once again that time might be on Moscow’s side. Dara Massicot argues in Foreign Affairs that none of these images reflects reality. Since the invasion began, Massicot, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has been analyzing the state of Russia’s military—its failure and its surprising resiliency. But what has struck Massicot more recently, and what she thinks many observers are missing, is the extent to which Russia has managed to learn and adapt—in Ukraine and beyond. She warns in a new piece for Foreign Affairs that “the Russian military will emerge from its invasion with extensive experience and a distinct vision of the future of combat”—experience it is already sharing with China, Iran, and North Korea. The United States and Europe should pay close attention. Because if they do not take it upon themselves to “study Russia’s studying,” as Massicot puts it, she worries that they risk not just losing Ukraine but also falling behind in the next global crisis. You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

When Xi Jinping took over the Chinese Communist Party in 2012, he began a new chapter in China’s history—one that would come to be defined above all by his grip on power. Xi overhauled not only the CCP but also China’s economy, military, and role in the world. Yet no matter how secure his power may be—and no matter his recent hot-mic musings about living to 150—what comes after Xi, and how it comes, is an increasingly central question in Chinese politics. As the political scientists Tyler Jost and Daniel Mattingly wrote recently in Foreign Affairs, “For any authoritarian regime, political succession is a moment of peril . . . and for all its strengths, the CCP is no exception.” And that’s not just a risk for the future. The uncertainty and the jockeying that the succession question spurs is already starting to shape China’s present. To Jost and Mattingly, there’s more at stake than just the matter of who will follow Xi. They note: “The drama created by a struggle over the succession . . . is unlikely to stay inside China’s borders.” They joined Deputy Editor Chloe Fox to discuss the nature of Xi’s rule, his attempt to define his legacy, and what that will mean for China in the coming months, years, and decades. You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

In early September, around 20 Russian drones entered Poland’s airspace. NATO and Polish forces scrambled fighter jets to shoot them down, but not before several had traveled hundreds of miles into Polish territory.  To Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, the incursion was not just a test of NATO’s resolve. It was a reminder of the precarious position of the alliance’s frontline states as the war in Ukraine grinds on for its third year, and as Donald Trump upends the basic bargain of the transatlantic alliance. Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke to Sikorski on the morning of September 24 in New York, where he was attending the UN General Assembly. They discussed the ongoing threat from Russia and what it will take, in Washington and in European capitals, to prevent it from escalating. But more than that, Sikorski is grappling with a moment of sharp change in geopolitics—trying to understand both why the old order collapsed and how to navigate the new order just now taking shape. You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

In 2024, the U.S. government discovered that Chinese hackers had penetrated a huge swath of the American telecommunications system—and remained there for years. That attack came to be known as Salt Typhoon. China has not only managed to steal the data and surveil the communications of hundreds of millions of Americans. It also embedded itself in the United States’ most important infrastructure, giving Beijing a crucial advantage in a conflict. Anne Neuberger was until recently the top cybersecurity official on the National Security Council. She was in that position when Salt Typhoon was discovered. And to her, the attack is not just an isolated incident of cyberespionage. Rather, it is evidence of American weakness, and Chinese dominance, in a central arena of national security. “Decades after the widespread adoption of the Internet opened a new realm of geopolitical contestation,” she writes in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, “the United States has fallen behind, failing to secure a vast digital home front.” Neuberger warns that, as artificial intelligence grows ever more sophisticated, the threat of a cyberattack that could paralyze the country in a time of crisis has never been higher. You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

Donald Trump has been railing against the global economic order from the start of his political career. But in his second term as president, he has turned that critique into blistering action. In just five months, the trade war that started with his April tariffs has completely reshaped the global economy—and struck at the very heart of the trade system that emerged after the end of the Cold War. To Michael Froman, the diagnosis is terminal. Froman, now the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, which publishes Foreign Affairs, served as the U.S. trade representative in the Obama administration. “Even if pieces of the old order manage to survive,” he writes in the new issue of Foreign Affairs, “the damage is done: there is no going back.” Trump’s “America first” trade policy, and China’s analogous strategy, herald a new order of protectionism, unilateralism, and mercantilism. Froman warns that economic anarchy could ensue. But as he sees it, any hope of resurrecting the corpse of the old order is delusional. “Nostalgia,” he argues, “is not a strategy.” Rather, the task at hand is to build a new “global economy shaped by rules even without a global rules-based system.” You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

It has been almost two years since Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel and the start of the war in Gaza. Those many months of combat have left Hamas severely weakened, with its leadership eviscerated and its military capabilities crippled. But as the war enters a new phase, with Israeli troops pushing into Gaza City, the central question of the war’s endgame remains unsettled. Israeli leaders have consistently refused to offer a clear vision for the war’s aftermath, for what happens on “the day after.” According to Ami Ayalon, that failure has been disastrous, for Palestinians as well as for Israelis. It is a recipe for conflict grinding on indefinitely, along with the attendant bloodshed and ongoing humanitarian catastrophe. Ayalon was the commander of the Israeli Navy and the head of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency. As he sees it, Israel’s long-term security depends on recognizing the rights and aspirations of Palestinians, and the creation of a Palestinian state—one that includes both Gaza and the West Bank. Ayalon joined Senior Editor Eve Fairbanks to reflect on the strategic errors that led to this point and how the world can reckon with those missteps to find a better path forward for both Israelis and Palestinians. You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

For decades, the United States has used its position at the center of global financial, commercial, and technological networks to punish adversaries and pressure allies, exploiting what the political scientists Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman call “weaponized interdependence.” Lacking any alternatives, the rest of the world has had no choice but to rely on American payment systems, American technology, and American corporate might, even as Washington turned that reliance to its own strategic advantage. Now, however, the tables have turned. Other states—starting with China—have begun to weaponize their own chokepoints in the global economic infrastructure. As Farrell and Newman write in the new issue of Foreign Affairs, “The United States is discovering what it is like to have others do unto it as it has eagerly done unto others.” Where it once pioneered the weaponization of interdependence, Washington may now be increasingly at the mercy of its rivals. To Newman and Farrell, this is more than just another salvo in global competition. It is evidence of a major transformation in geopolitics, as national security and economic power have merged—and ushered in a new era of economic warfare. You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.