U.S. President Donald Trump famously tweeted during his first term, “Trade wars are good, and easy to win.” But the record of the trade war that Trump started with his so-called Liberation Day tariffs in early April suggests that things are a bit more complicated.

In an essay for Foreign Affairs appropriately titled, “Trade Wars Are Easy to Lose,” the economist Adam Posen argues that the United States has a weaker hand than the Trump administration believes. That’s especially true when it comes to China, the world’s second-largest economy and perhaps the real target of Trump’s trade offensive. “It is China that has escalation dominance in this trade war,” Posen writes. “Washington, not Beijing, is betting all in on a losing hand.”

Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke to Posen, who is president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, on June 9 about the short- and long-term effects of Trump’s tariffs and the economic uncertainty they’ve caused, about what it would take to constructively remake the global economy, and about the growing risks to the United States’ economic position at an especially dangerous time.

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

It has become a trope to lament and lambast the wishful thinking that shaped U.S. policy toward China in the two decades after the Cold War. That policy rested on a prediction about China’s future: that with economic growth and ongoing diplomatic, economic, and cultural engagement—with the United States and the rest of the world—China would become more like the United States—more politically open at home and more accepting of the existing order abroad.

It is hard to deny that this prediction proved wrong. But Rana Mitter, the S.T. Lee Chair in U.S.-Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School and one of the great historians of China, reminds readers that predictions about China almost always prove wrong. And as he writes in a new essay in Foreign Affairs, it would be equally foolish to assume that China must remain on its current trajectory of more confrontation abroad and repression at home. “Another China remains possible,” Mitter argues. And how that China develops will be one of the most important factors in geopolitics for decades to come.

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

The war in Sudan gets only a fraction of the attention that conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza and potential conflicts elsewhere get. But after two years of fighting, it has created the biggest humanitarian crisis ever recorded. And as the two sides in the conflict, the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, vie for control of the country and its resources, there is little hope of a conclusion any time soon. As the war goes on, and a growing number of outside powers look for advantage in the carnage, the consequences are likely to get even worse, argue Mai Hassan and Ahmed Kodouda in a recent Foreign Affairs essay—not just for Sudan, but for the rest of its region as well.

Both Hassan, an Associate Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Kodouda, a humanitarian policy expert who was based in Sudan until March 2023, have spent years watching what is happening in Sudan. They joined senior editor Eve Fairbanks to discuss the roots of what has become an intractable conflict, and whether a path out of it is possible.

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