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.
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Can Israel Save Itself?
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.
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The Rise of the Economic Security State
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.
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Why Is America Going It Alone?
During his second term, Donald Trump has railed against the United States’ closest allies. He has imposed tariffs, threatened to upend security commitments, and openly challenged the borders of Canada, Panama, and Greenland.
Historians often look to the past for insight about the present and future. But although alliances have collapsed for many reasons over past centuries, Margaret MacMillan argues in a recent essay for Foreign Affairs that Trump’s current behavior toward allies has little precedent. His approach, she writes, “does not suggest a clever Machiavellian policy to enhance American power; rather, it shows a United States acting against its own interests in bewildering fashion, undermining one of the key sources of that power.”
A renowned historian and professor emeritus of international history at Oxford University, MacMillan is one of the greatest chroniclers of the grand alliances of the twentieth century and the world wars they fought. She joined Editor-at-Large Hugh Eakin on August 18 to discuss the normalization of conquest and the war in Ukraine, how U.S. allies are calculating their next steps, and what the United States’ approach to its alliances will mean for the future.
You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.
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Best of: Is the World Ready for the Population Bust?
In an episode released in January 2025, Senior Editor Kanishk Tharoor spoke with the political economist Nicholas Eberstadt about the global crash in fertility rates and the looming prospect of depopulation.
Over the past century, the world’s population has exploded—surging from around one and a half billion people in 1900 to roughly eight billion today. But according to Eberstadt, that chapter of human history is over, and a new era, which he calls the age of depopulation, has begun. That subject has become even more prevalent in the past year. The United States, for example, recorded its lowest ever birthrate in 2024.
Eberstadt is the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute and has written extensively on demographics, economic development, and international security. In a 2024 essay for Foreign Affairs, Eberstadt argued that plummeting fertility rates everywhere from the United States and Europe to India and China point to a new demographic order—one that will transform societies, economies, and geopolitics.
You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.
Foreign Affairs invites you to join its editor, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, as he talks to influential thinkers and policymakers about the forces shaping the world. Whether the topic is the war in Ukraine, the United States’ competition with China, or the future of globalization, Foreign Affairs’ weekly podcast offers the kind of authoritative commentary and analysis that you can find in the magazine and on the website.
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