It is an understatement to say that the United States finds itself at a particularly fraught geopolitical juncture. The outcome of the war in Iran is still uncertain. The war in Ukraine continues with no end in sight. Add to that U.S.-Chinese competition, overlapping planetary crises, a highly erratic hegemon—the list could go on.

Such an unstable world presents a formidable test for policymakers in Washington and in every other capital, and no one understands that test better than Jake Sullivan. He served as U.S. President Joe Biden’s national security adviser for four years, after serving in a number of senior national security jobs in the Obama administration. Much of what he dealt with in those jobs, including China, Gaza, Iran, and Ukraine, remains at crisis or near-crisis levels for U.S. foreign policy today. And, as Sullivan writes in a new essay for Foreign Affairs, technological change, especially in AI, is adding new layers of complexity and risk to all of those challenges.

Dan Kurtz-Phelan, who worked for Sullivan at the State Department in the first part of the Obama administration, spoke with him on Monday, April 20, about the key tests for the United States today, and about what American power will look like after U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term.

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

The shockwaves of the ongoing war in Iran are being felt far and wide. The continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz has sparked a global energy crisis, one that could be accentuated by a U.S. naval blockade. Countries as disparate as Chile, South Korea, and Zambia have been forced to take extraordinary measures to deal with shortages and surging prices. But the war’s effects are not just material. Washington’s decision to attack Iran is accelerating a process already underway: the receding of both the inspiration and the reality of American power.

That, at least, is the view of our two guests in this episode. Matias Spektor is a professor of Politics and International Relations at Fundação Getulio Vargas in São Paulo. Kishore Mahbubani is a distinguished fellow at the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore and a veteran Singaporean diplomat, who served as his country’s ambassador to the United Nations for over a decade.

In their essays for Foreign Affairs, both Spektor and Mahbubani have sought to alert readers to changes in geopolitics that may be hard to see from Western capitals. The war on Iran, in their view, is misguided in its motivations and its execution. And its consequences could be hugely damaging for the United States, offering further proof that the world may be slipping out of the United States’ grasp.

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

On Tuesday night, as the world held its collective breath, U.S. President Donald Trump announced a temporary cease-fire with Iran, just hours after warning that “a whole civilization will die” if the Iranian regime did not completely open the Strait of Hormuz. In exchange for a cessation of American and Israeli strikes, Iran has agreed to allow oil and other commodities to pass through the strait for two weeks and to stop its own attacks on its neighbors, giving both sides time to negotiate a more comprehensive peace deal. But many of the details of the cease-fire remain unclear, as do its chances of holding. A war that began with Trump’s call for regime change now seems destined to leave the Iranian regime in place, emboldened and more certain of its resilience than ever before.

Suzanne Maloney is vice president of the Brookings Institution and director of its Foreign Policy program. She has helped craft U.S. Middle East policy, serving in positions in the White House and the State Department across multiple administrations. Executive Editor Justin Vogt spoke with her on the morning of Wednesday, April 8, to help make sense of the cease-fire and get a grasp on what might come next.

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