Is a Post-American World Inevitable? A Conversation With Kurt Campbell, Rush Doshi, and Mark Leonard

I'm Dan Kurtz-Phalen, and this is the Foreign Affairs Interview. I fear that having Trump elected twice does mean that nobody is ever going to be able to think about alliances in the same way that they did in the past. There are very powerful gravitational forces that we see pulling allies together, even though some allies are trying very hard to de-risk from Washington. We're going to see, I think, beginning in the fall and winter, a dramatic resurgence in discussion, debate, hope, and frankly, optimism about what comes next. And there's going to be a lot of discussion about looking two years ahead. I can't imagine anything worse for President Trump than to be overlooked as people are anticipating the future. But that is exactly what is going to happen. Ever since Donald Trump returned to the White House last year, a big question has loomed over any discussion of global politics. How much of the change Trump has brought to U.S. foreign policy and to the international system will endure beyond this presidential term? Two essays that opened the new issue of Foreign Affairs offer different answers to that question. Kurt Campbell and Rush Doshi, two senior officials in the Biden administration, argue that the U.S. alliance system will not just survive Trump, but can emerge stronger, even better suited to capturing China and its partners. Mark Leonard, the director of the U.S. Foreign Affairs Office, said, The U.S. foreign affairs center, the director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, argues that policymakers in allied capitals and beyond must accept that the United States has fundamentally changed and get ready to survive a more turbulent and contested world. I wanted to bring Campbell, Doshi, and Leonard together in one conversation to lay out and test these contrasting arguments. We spoke on August 12th about possible futures for U.S. foreign policy and what those paths mean for a global order built by a very different America. Their essays can be read in the new print issue of Foreign Affairs. If you're not a Foreign Affairs subscriber yet, you can go to foreignaffairs.com slash interview to sign up now and read all the essays discussed on our podcast. If you prefer to listen, audio versions of these articles and lots of others are also included with subscription to Foreign Affairs. So if you haven't joined us yet, that link is foreignaffairs.com slash interview. Kurt, Rush, Mark, thanks to you all for being here. We were thrilled. We're thrilled to have your essays leading off our new issue, How Alliances Survive is the piece by Kurt and Rush, and The Abandoned Order is Mark's. Both are fascinating in their own right, and they're also fascinating, I think, when read together, in part because of the tensions between the arguments, but also because of some intriguing echoes. So I'm thrilled to have all three of you here together. Thank you very much, Dan. Thanks, Dan. Thank you. Rush, let me start with you on your piece with Kurt. You two make a case for optimism about U.S. alliances and the alliance system more broadly. That case is surprising. Not just in light of the, you know, kind of dominant headlines about alliances in the last year and a half, but also because you two served on the Biden National Security Council. So politically speaking, you'd be expected to indulge in pretty full-throated predictions of doom at this point. What does the pessimism that nothing will ever be the same in these relationships and hedging will erode alliances over time and trust will never come back? And, you know, the arguments, what does that pessimism get wrong? Well, let me just start with what I think is clear to everybody, which is that it's. Undeniable to damage done. The alliances in the last 18 months has exceeded what was done in the whole first term of President Trump's administration way back. I think a lot of the commentary, I think this is the argument Kurt and I would make. A lot of it tends towards fatalism and despair that we think may be premature. That fatalism is driven by a real sense of grievance. I think the alliances for many are over or they won't ever recover. But I think for us, that sense of grievance may not be the best analytical empirical way to think about what comes next. And what we're trying to do is not diminish the concerns that exist. But maybe contextualize them a bit better, because we're worried that if it hardens into conventional wisdom, if that despair becomes accepted widely, then it risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy where policymakers who are convinced that the alliances can't be saved stop doing the work essentially to save them. And basically, our argument has three large components. We argue first that the alliance system has weathered a lot of forgotten shocks that are at least as serious as many of these, with one major exception. And at the present circumstances, we're experiencing a lot more of presidential crisis. We're experiencing a lot more of presidential personality than to a kind of durable new politics that will change the way America does alliances forever. And we can go into some of the details there. But if you look across even our Cold War history, from the Suez crisis of the 50s to the debates about French participation in NATO in the 60s, where they pushed the U.S. essentially out of France for a while, to some of the challenges in the 70s, like the Plaza Accord in the 80s, and the 70s decision to go off the gold standard, all of that combined, those are real major shocks that I think are worth taking into account. We've weathered shocks like those before. Maybe some of the ones we're seeing today should be seen in that history. And there are many, many others. The collapse of the Soviet Union was foretold to mean the end of the alliance system, and that didn't happen. Even in Asia, where there's a lot of distrust about U.S. alliances after Saigon, there was a sense that maybe everybody should go nuclear. That didn't happen. And, of course, those alliances look stronger. So the history, we think, is important. Second, we have this feeling that the threats that gave rise to these alliances haven't really faded. In many ways, those threats have intensified. And perceptions between the U.S., Europe, and many of its allies are at least converging on elements of that threat, even though there are some disagreements within the Trump administration. And really, it's on the China-Russia axis or nexus or relationship, where there's a sense that China is going to hollow out the industrial base of Europe, hollow out the industrial base of Japan and Korea and Taiwan and the United States. So there's an economic rationale to work together. And there's a sense across theaters that China and Russia are posing security challenges, not individually, but together to Europe and to Asia. And that's creating some cause for greater convergence. The final point is that there are very powerful gravitational forces that we see pulling allies together, even though some allies are trying very hard to de-risk from Washington. If you think about it economically, this second China shock is also pulling the U.S. and Europe together. Technologically, even as countries try to unwind their dependence on the United States, there's still new dependencies being created in AI and cloud. And then in the military sense, everybody is pursuing a defense buildup. Well, the U.S. is a key component of that defense buildup. Even as there's de-risking. So these megatrends, if you will, pull countries together, even though they may be trying to pull apart. And beneath the surface, quiet professional bureaucracies are moving forward with a lot of initiatives beyond the glare of politics, beyond the glare of recrimination. I think I'd end with this. We're not making the case that we can go back. We're not making the case that everything's fine. We're not making the case for restoration. We're making the case for what we think is pragmatism, given this environment of fatalism, that the alliances will endure. And the question really is whether they will evolve. For new challenges in the period ahead. And we'd like folks to be thinking harder about what that agenda is going to be. We're at a moment now, and I'll end with this, where I think the ball is in the air for what American policy and ally policy will be. We're thinking about what comes after Trump. And in this environment, it's worth considering what the ally structure could become, rather than just assume that maybe that structure is a relic of the past. Kurt, let me ask you to pick up where Rush left off. I think there's an element of your piece that is perhaps even more surprising than the case. It's against pessimism. And that's the case for relative optimism about what the alliance system can look like and achieve in, you know, over a 10-year period. If you look beyond Trump, you argue that ultimately the real increase in ally capability, that's come in part because of the anxiety that Trump has induced and the pressure that he's put on allies, actually will put the system in a pretty good position to evolve into the kind of structure that you and Rush and your colleagues are trying to build in the Biden years. What's the case of that optimistic path as, in fact, possible? It's not just that we shouldn't be fatalistic, but there's actually an opportunity that didn't look so real even two years ago. Well, first and again, thank you very much for having us. And, Mark, it's a pleasure to be with you and look forward to discussing the elements of each of our pieces. So, look, I would just simply say we're using a lot of concepts like optimism, pessimism. I think at the core of our piece, I think, is a realism and a hard-headed recognition both across the Atlantic and with our Indo-Pacific. partners of the kinds of challenges that are animating the global system, particularly the challenge presented from China in technology, military, overcapacity, and the like. And we believe that that has brought forward a degree of alignment that in many ways is unprecedented. I would also just simply say that our piece really is not about resurrecting or going back to the past. It is really a recognition that there are going to be elements of the system are going to survive despite the damage done by Trump. We do not argue that, and we do not in any way excuse the steps that the Trump administration have taken. But we also underscore that some of those concerns preceded Trump, and we've seen it over a longer period of time. We've argued that what's necessary is to abandon certain kind of paternalistic, uneven partnerships, in which both parties commit to doing more, both the United States and allies and partners. One of the points we make in our piece, Dan, is that Trump has argued for other partners to do more so we can do less. That's not the equation we're looking for. We're asking for both to double down on greater cooperation in technology and munitions and intelligence sharing across the board. And we believe that's the path that's necessary going forward. We also argue one of the things that you've seen is this clarion call for middle powers coming together. In truth, the United States has called for middle powers to take a larger share of responsibility to work more closely together. We're seeing that in India, in Canada, in Europe, in Japan, new alliances and formations forming. However, each of these countries are also seeking in their own way to deepen relations with the United States. And we believe in a different and new conception that those partnerships can be empowered with the United States continuing to play a role. And then just lastly, just an anecdote, Dan, to the very good point Rush made. I was at NATO not long ago. I was in one hall in which the political leaders were listening to a Trump administration official berate them. You could see the hostility and the distrust. You walk down the hall to a sort of a lesser group of bureaucrats, and they're busily doing the work of the alliance outside of the glare of this sort of public insult-driven dynamic. And so we believe that the true deep state is busy basically sustaining habits of cooperation and elements of engagement between the United States and its key partners, because it is one of the clearest elements of bipartisan commitment that continues into this very difficult age. I want to go to Mark in a second, but Kurt, let me stick with you on just one point. You were one of the people who, when the Biden administration started in 2021 and over the next four years, was charged with really shoring up U.S. alliances after another tense period in the first Trump terms. You guys say in the piece, and Rush said earlier, this time has been different and worse in that regard. But you were in the White House as the top Asia official, and you were deputy secretary of state. As you were trying to rebuild alliances and reassure allies, what were those conversations like? And as you encountered skepticism about the reliability of the U.S., what was most difficult to overcome in that regard? So, look, I think in many respects, Dan, you have to separate the rhetoric from the reality. In almost all the meetings that we had initially were just outpouring of disappointment, concerns, anxieties, insults, attacks against the United States for our lack of credibility and, you know, departing from historical norms and values. The hardest thing and the most important thing I would communicate to a new team that is going to come out of this is, you know, we're going to have to that is going to come to power, if we're lucky, in the next three years, is that they're going to hear a lot of that, and they're going to have to basically power their way through it to key arenas of cooperation that were basically based in self-interest of both sides, and that some of the sentiment that surrounds these negotiations and discussions will be hostile and difficult, and it would be great to resume and recapture a higher degree of trust in the kind of kumbaya spirit that at times, only at times, has animated our relationship with our allies and partners, but to recognize most clearly that you've got to be hard-headed and thick-skinned and recognize that we're doing this together because it is in all of our best interests, and I think that's probably the biggest lesson I learned, but in almost every endeavor, whether it was AUKUS or the Quad or the trilateral engagement with partners in Japan and South Korea or work that we did with Europe behind the scenes on what Russia and China were doing together, maybe initial quibbles and quarrels, but very quickly getting down to the business of the actual arenas of cooperation, and at the core of our piece is that those areas have expanded and demand more allied work together than probably ever before in our history. So fewer gauzy, soaring speeches and more boring, long meetings in conference rooms, essentially. Mark, before we get into the substance of your piece, which is not exactly what the alliance system is about, about a kind of world without order, about all these structures breaking down, I am interested in your response on alliances. You spend much of your time in Europe and talking to European policymakers, and you've also lived in and written on Asia in the past. What do you see as plausible or not in the case against pessimism that Kurt Rush made? I think Kurt and I are both really inspiring thinkers, but also were amazing practitioners and managed to build a level of understanding and ethic of cooperation on Asia, where you had no track record between Europeans and Americans during the Cold War, and to knit together the different alliances across different theatres, and it was really very, very impressive what they managed to do. And I do think there certainly was a huge desire in European countries and in Asian countries after the Biden administration came back to power after Trump's first term to make the alliances much stronger, to knit them together in new ways, to expand them away from the traditional areas where they were working into new geoeconomics, technology, all sorts of other areas. And it was a very inspiring and exciting experience. And I think that's what I'm most excited about. I think it's a very exciting experience. And I think it's a very exciting agenda. But I fear that having Trump elected twice does mean that nobody is ever going to be able to think about alliances in the same way that they did in the past. There isn't a single country in Europe, apart from maybe France, that feels any schadenfreude about the state of the transatlantic alliance. And, you know, at the moment, when there are NATO summits, I get text messages from different European leaders, panicking about what's going to happen. The whole mise-en-scene of these events is all about stopping disastrous things from taking place rather than actually achieving anything together. There's zero trust in the relationship. And the messages are about the U.S. providing less and less to Europeans and asking for more and more alignment in areas which sometimes go against their direct interests. Even under the Biden administration, you know, because the U.S. has so many other priorities, the amount of energy and attention that they're giving to the United States is going to go down. And the amount of energy and attention that gets put into getting into a place that's conducive to European interests on third issues is kind of shrinking. So I think that the U.S., as its attention shifts to other parts of the world, as it becomes harder and harder to achieve things, is going to find it very, very difficult to maintain the kind of virtuosic alliance management that Russia and Kurt were able to do when they were serving in the administrations. And on the other side, there is some very, very expensive hedging that's taking place. So, you know, the good scenario would be that you get much more capable allies and that the alliances are much stronger and that Europeans are actually able to pull their weight and able to make a meaningful contribution rather than being sort of vassalized and infantilized, you know, kind of whingy partners that they can actually do something. But, you know, I think there's so much damage done that we're going to be in a very, very different place. And certainly when I talk to other people in Asia, you know, people are saying out loud now things that they would maybe think privately, but would never express. You can, you know, I heard a former Japanese national security advisor say, I'm not sure if the U.S. will be there for us if we have a kind of problem, which is a pretty extraordinary situation for a, you know, Japanese diplomat to be saying things like that on the record in public, you know, and that's before we get to. allies in the Middle East who might not have great alternatives, but they are extraordinarily destabilized. And there are tensions between these different alliances. What we're seeing increasingly is that there is a bleed across from the security situation in one theater to another. And I think where Kurt and Rush were very successful was finding ways of making that into a positive thing. So on Ukraine, for example, getting Korea and Japan, to play a very important part in managing the Ukraine situation. But I think that's not a given. I think, you know, we could see these different theaters pulling in different directions and creating real security dilemmas for a lot of countries. And I'm not sure that the U.S. in the future is either going to have the wherewithal or the bandwidth or the public support to really invest in turning these alliances into things which can solve problems for other countries. It doesn't mean the alliances will disappear, but I fear there'll be a kind of thinning out of the agenda for cooperation. You know, it's clear that Japan and India and the U.S. will always share a lot of interest in common when it comes to managing China, and that's not going to disappear. But I think they will become more transactional than they have been in the past, and maybe more in tension with one another. Just lingering on the point you made earlier in your answer on hedging, I think, in some ways, this comes down to the question of whether hedging that is happening over the course of the Trump administration, and presumably subsequently, causes irreversible changes or not. As you talk to policymakers in European and Middle Eastern and Asian capitals, where do you see hedging that may, in fact, have irreversible effects? What kind of hedging do you think may have irreversible effects? Some of it might end up being positive. But if you take Denmark, for example, which is maybe one of the most extreme countries, they didn't, really have a kind of indigenous military. They basically tried to create, series of spare parts for expeditionary missions, which the US led in different places, and they wanted to be able to plug in and be useful to these things. And they're now, you know, having to kind of rethink their entire position from the ground up. They're going to be much more focused on territorial defense and on their own priorities. And they're literally having to rethink absolutely everything from a kind of doctrinal perspective, from a strategy perspective in terms of where their spending goes, who they sign contracts with. But you're having similar things, maybe not to that extent, given that Greenland was a particularly, well, it was an extraordinary and I think unique situation. But you are having similar processes being undertaken by a lot of other countries. And basically, you're moving from a situation where countries saw themselves within the context of an alliance system, and how do we plug and play and make it all about interoperability with America? And then you're moving from an American grand strategy towards one where the primary goal is how do we hedge and how do we make sure that we can defend ourselves if America isn't there? So you'll make very, very different choices. And three, four, five years, you probably won't notice much difference. But if you see that going on for five, 10, 15, 20 years, and also if you do see, you know, large amounts of money, you know, Germany's going to spend 500 billion euros on this over the next period of time. Once you start doing that over the next period of time, you're going to see a lot of different choices. And I think Germany's going to spend a lot of money on this over a long period of time. Germany will be spending as much as France and the UK combined by 2029. So if you start to make sovereign decisions about that, and you don't just think about yourself as operating within a US alliance system, but developing different kinds of relationships, it's clear that you will just have a different sort of structure. And if that's happening at a time when the US is actually able to offer less within each individual theater as a result of burgeon shifting, then you're going to see a lot of different choices. travel in our partnerships in the Indo-Pacific. So this is not to the transatlantic relationship we have faced these challenges more generally. I would just say one thing, Dan, and I want to commend Foreign Affairs for this. Our larger proposition here is one that, frankly, Rush alluded to just at the end. I think our belief is that after these elections in the United States, we're going to see, I think, beginning in the fall and winter, a dramatic resurgence in discussion, debate, hope, and, frankly, optimism about what comes next. And the hope is, with these essays and engagements, that we animate that discussion. And our own belief is that, in many respects, we have agency. And some of this is self-fulfilling. I know what Mark is speaking to. There is almost an inverse relationship. If your interlocutor from Europe believes that you are a supporter of Europe and a supporter of alliances, he is much more likely to say the most harsh and horrible things about how this is unrecoverable. And so there is that ironic dynamic here. I do believe that Europe has. in public opinion polling, is on to something that Rush laid out, in which they are already anticipating the future. And they see this leadership as increasingly personalistic, and that more and more the subtle signaling, although sometimes pathetic, from Republicans and others is that we're not on board for seizing Greenland. In fact, much of what President Trump is involved in is really not about. an agenda for the future. We'll return to my conversation with Kirk Campbell, Rush Doshi, and Mark Leonard after a short break. What if you could explore places in the news like a reporter does? I'm Nicholas Wood, a former journalist with the New York Times and BBC. And 16 years ago, I created the travel company Political Tours. Our small groups are led by top correspondents around the world. In the next few months, we're off to Mexico, followed by South Africa, Japan, and the French presidential elections. Come and join us. Go to politicaltours.com. That's politicaltours.com. This September, Independent 20th Century presents more than 130 artists at the legendary Broyu building at 945 Madison Avenue. The show will fill four floors of the modernist landmark on Museum Mile. See why? Art News Magazine calls Independent 20th Century a staple of the season and experience historic modern art from around the world in one of New York's most iconic spaces, September 24th to 27th. To learn more, visit independenthq.com. Did you know that Foreign Affairs editor Dan Kurtz-Valen sends a free newsletter every Saturday? Visit foreignaffairs.com slash spotlight to get the editor's spotlight, a weekly email from Dan featuring more of the helpful context and clear analysis of the world. That's foreignaffairs.com slash spotlight. Sign up today. Mark, I want to focus on a point that is in some ways at the center or at least a starting point for your essay and also relates to the point that Kurt just made. And that's really about the United States. I think if, you know, you're not going to say it this uncharitably, but I think one way of applying the argument in your piece to the hopes that a lot of people are going to have, a lot of people in the American foreign policy world have for the future of what American policy might look like, might look to you like delusional, magical thinking that, you know, you may be able to see us from the outside better than we see ourselves. You argue in the piece that the U.S. is not going to come back as a kind of guarantor of order. It's not going to support allies in the same way. Why do you see that change as enduring or permanent? And how do you trace the kind of systemic effects of that when it comes to the order more broadly? So I think that when people talk about world order, they often start with Henry Kissinger, who kind of argues that you have these sort of two pillars for it, which is a commonly agreed set of rules about what states can and can't do, which people might not love, but at least willing to live with. And then a balance of power, which can somehow enforce them and ensure that they take place. And if we think about the order that we've had over the last period of time, we did have those things. And the U.S. was the kind of central glue, which both helped to develop those rules and then also to enforce them. And America, you know, isn't going away. It's still the preeminent military, economic and technological power in the world. But it is changing in quite a fundamental way as the balance of power in the world changes. And I think it's increasingly clear that Washington has lost its ability. To prevent conflicts, to ensure the free flow of commerce around the world. It can't even open the Straits of Hormuz. It's struggled to get the Houthis into line in the Red Sea. And, you know, there's always been asymmetric challenges to American power. You know, Kurt talked about Vietnam earlier. We saw what happened in Afghanistan and places like that. But I think there are a series of technologies which have emerged which make it easier for weaker opponents to create a lot of disruption, as Iran is kind of proving on the one hand. And there's also, you know, has been a diffusion of power in the world. So America is still a lot more powerful than China and Russia and all the middle powers are at the moment in many domains. But they never really accepted the legitimacy of a lot of these rules. And they now have more of an ability to thwart them and to push back on them. So you have this sort of power transition on the one hand. And then what I think is, you know, it's a lot of power transition on the other hand. And then what I think is, an absolute killer is the way that the US itself is responding to that power transition. And that is essentially to go from seeing itself as a systemic power that stands for something larger than its own interests, and is about upholding a system and playing a kind of hegemonic role towards being a kind of selfish, powerful state that is pursuing its own interests on the world stage. And it's been, really striking how Donald Trump has managed to launch a sort of revolution against the American order and to present the US as the biggest victim of that order. And, you know, he's delegitimated all of the different pillars of it, starting with the alliance system, which we've been talking about, but extending to the way the economy works to other kind of areas of life. And, you know, I very much hope that the Democrats come back at the next election, you'll get a different president. But I think it's unlikely that you're going to see a new president emerging who stands on a platform of making the US into the world's primary provider of public goods. Its police officer is champion of free trade. And I think that it would be irresponsible after Trump's elected twice for other countries to assume that that's going to happen, which is why we have the hedging behavior that we talked about. So I think the US is no longer going to play the sort of systemic role that it's done beforehand, both for internal reasons and because of what's happening in the world. And what that means is that there is a sort of structural change from a much more hegemonic role for the US where you can have the sort of central role that we've been talking about earlier. And you can think about there being an order towards a world that is characterized by an absence of order, and like in the piece, I kind of talk about three big trends which are reshaping the international system and which mean that it's very unlikely that we are going to see order in the near future. And they are what I call fragmentation, contagion and strangulation. And you're seeing that in lots of different domains. But basically, the fragmentation is very clear. Alliances, as we've been discussing, are kind of splintering in new ways. It's not just Western alliances. If you look at the GCC in the Middle East, if you look at what's happening to the global trade system, if you look at what happens. We should say the GCC, since American officials have been getting this wrong, is the Gulf Cooperation Council, not the Gulf Coast Council, which is, I think, what the Vice President said at some point. Yeah, sorry about that. I should have made that clearer. But anyway, we're seeing a lot of fragmentation of alliances. We're seeing a fragmentation of the global economy, but not into neat blocks. Instead, it's quite a messy. Messy thing where you've got lots of different operating systems which are coexisting and often competing with each other, whether it's over technology, whether it's over trade, whether it's on what we're doing on the energy transition and climate change. And you're also seeing a degree of economic nationalism and protectionism, which Trump has obviously been pushing out of Washington, but being replicated. And all the other great powers around the world. So you're seeing much more friction emerging. So the. kind of identity of interests that, you know, that sort of substructure on which the political superstructure of the West and the alliance system was based is also starting to kind of disappear to an extent. And then on top of that, and maybe most dramatically, you have, you know, what maybe a slightly highfalutin way of putting it, but you could call epistemic fragmentation, the fact that we don't even share common idea about what's going on in the world. We're not just arguing about different interpretations about what's happening. There are just fundamentally different facts in different places. And that obviously has an impact within our societies, but it has an even bigger impact when it comes to international relations. So you don't have a common basis of reality on which to build international law, diplomacy, and cooperation. Kurt and Roshan, I want to pick up on the China dimension of this, both because the convergence around or perceptions around the challenge from China and Russia, to a lesser degree, are part of the key sources of alliance cohesion in your argument, but also because, as you note, coalition splitting, breaking up these alliances is one of China's key priorities. How do you think China is playing this moment? Is it doing an effective job of that? Well, first, let me just pick up on something Mark said, and then bring in your question directly into that. I mean, Mark correctly notes that order itself is fraying because the U.S. may not be as flexible as it used to be. And that's true. That's a fact. One of the implications of that fact is that we don't know exactly where the world is going to go. It could go in a few different directions, right? It could go towards what some call multipolarity, every great power for itself. That can be very habeasian. It can lead to war. Another possibility that's a little tamer is maybe we have regional spheres of influence. Each great power monopolizes its region, and they all agree to divide up the world. That has a lot of problems, but it's also not stable. Every time that's been said, every great power is fighting over the boundaries of their spheres, as we saw after Yalta. And then a third possibility is we could get a concert of power. All the great powers get together and figure out the rules like they did after the Napoleonic Wars, and that preserves the peace. But right now, that seems hard to imagine. There's so much change in the world, and there's so much disagreement on everything from AI to climate that it's just hard to do. But here's the most important point. This gets to what you said, Dan, that all of those three alternative worlds assume a relative equality among the great powers that might not be coming, right? If you look at the great powers, I think one of them is more great than the others in particular, and that's China. And China's scale, as we've talked about in the past, is enormous, right? We're talking about more than twice the share of global manufacturing that the U.S. has, greater than the next nine countries combined in global manufacturing, dominates industry after industry, leading in technology, the fastest military and nuclear buildup in many ways in history. This is not a great power that is equivalent to Russia or Germany or France. This is a power that is unique and exceeds the U.S. on many foundational metrics of power. And so when you think about those different worlds, the other world we could imagine is a world where China is more powerful than the other powers, and it's a world of partial Chinese hegemony or partial Chinese preeminence. And that's why the need for allies to work together is probably greater, because in a lot of the areas we care about, take industrial capacity, we're not going to be able to bring back some of those industries like pharmaceuticals or biotechnology or robotics or heavy forges on our own. Indeed, a lot of that capacity is diversified across the allies. And so you've got to work together to create resiliency and industrial capacity. That's a new form of cooperation that we haven't had in the past. The way that China would like to proceed, and if you look at the history of how states that are aspiring for preeminence respond, the goal is to divide up the balancing coalition that might be growing against them or that kind of cooperation we're talking about. That's the question. Can you divide and conquer the other forces that are aligning to create order? And so China's ambition is to use economic instruments like rare earths, political instruments like, you know, information, politics, as well as perhaps even in Asia, some military instruments to get everybody to basically deal with them bilaterally and not to work together. And in fact, if you work together, they say that's containment, even though they're too big to contain. So how well is that going for China? I don't think it's going super well, because facts are stubborn things. And the fact is that everybody around the world is seeing what's happening, that China's sheer capacity to create order is not going to work. And so China's ambition is to use economic instruments to create order. And so China's sheer capacity is eroding the industrial bases everywhere, that technologically there's new dependencies on China that are emerging, and militarily there's new threats. So they have not played, I think, this moment as deftly as they could. They're about to enter perhaps a trade war with Europe. They've got the Japanese and Koreans terribly afraid of the future. And the Indians, by all rights, should be cooperating with China on industrial matters and art. And that suggests, I think, that they are going to do what they tend to do, which is overreach, misplay their hand, be a bit overconfident, and that will potentially give space for our allies to work together. And so I think that's the question. And I think that's the question. But if we fail to build that kind of allied alternative to those other four worlds, the result might be Chinese preeminence, and that's a world that's worse for everybody. So I agree with Mark that order is fracturing, but the alternatives to the kind of order that Kurt and I might propose we build together are significantly worse for everybody. The tragedy is at the very time that Europe is wanting to have a constructive, substantial dialogue about a coherent strategy for how to deal with security and economic realm, the Trump administration is absent. And I believe with him off the stage that there will be a strong bipartisan consensus in the United States that engaging in that very dialogue and working together is very much in the strategic interests of the United States. The idea of working with Europe is not some lefty, crazy concept. It is based in the most credible element of conservative and Republican policymaking over generations. As you spend a lot of time reading Chinese analysis and Chinese discourse, how are they talking about the alliance system right now, as you read it? Well, look, and we've seen this movie before. Back in the Trump first term, the Chinese were ecstatic that the possibility of U.S. alliances being broken by President Trump was a godsend to them. They understood that our biggest asymmetric advantage was our alliance system. And you can read Chinese scholar after scholar. And even officials celebrate America's alienation of those allies. Now, that proved to be premature. You know, the subsequent administration pulled those alliances back together. Even the damage in that first period was perhaps slightly overstated. And in the second period, in the Biden administration, China understood, wow, these alliances may be more resilient than we thought. Once again, though, with Trump's second term, there is great joy in many ways in strategic circles about the American destruction of the alliance system. They are cheering on the idea that the U.S. would be good for them. Division among the West, among the U.S. and Japan and Korea and Europe and Canada and Mexico and India, that's good for China. But again, as Kurt mentioned, they have not been effective and nimble in calibrating coercive and consensual instruments. They lean very hard on threats and coercion on regrets, even against Europe and Japan, when adept or touch might be more effective in pulling these allies and partners towards them and away from us. So the irony of the situation is they've got a moment of opportunity, to consolidate their gains, to basically wedge open the allied system. They know it. They've known it in the past. And both times, they've failed to fully seize that opportunity. Mark, let me go to you on the China question that we've been discussing. You've written for Foreign Affairs and others about how China approaches changes in world order and how Chinese strategy seeks to respond to them. What is your assessment of how well Chinese policymakers are managing this moment when it comes to their own interests, this kind of broader question? I think that China thinks that it's done an exceptional job of handling Donald Trump and the U.S. And it's certainly true if you look at the balance sheet on the trade war, that things have not panned out the way that the Trump administration hoped it would have done. The balance power has obviously shifted in China's favor. And I think the way that they've used instruments is something which was the product of years of investment and of thinking about how to create new tools and instruments. And there's a whole cottage industry in China at the moment looking at how you can broaden the leverage that they've managed to get out of rare earths recently to other choke points in the global system and to use that against the U.S. and against other powers. I think that has led to a degree of hubris about China's power and could very well lead to them overplaying their hand when it comes to other powers. I think that they've done a very poor job of handling Europe, for example, where, you know, Europeans and European countries, particularly Germany, really very much on the front line and see themselves as being de-industrialized as a result of Chinese excess capacity. And the debates about China's shock 2.0 have reached fever pitch in European capitals. And I think you could see European countries taking actions which would have been unthinkable even a few weeks ago, let alone a few years ago, against China. And I think it's partly because they've over-interpreted how successful they were at handling the U.S. and also treated the Europeans as if they were completely analogous to China when it came to how to respond to tariffs, whereas obviously Europeans have got other interests at play and they have a much more restrained in terms of what they could do on tariffs because they were worried about Ukraine and security issues. But where I think they have been successful, and this is something which I've written about both in this piece and in earlier pieces in Foreign Affairs, is in understanding how the dynamics of global politics are changing and where to position yourself for a world that is going from one which had an order, which had a system, towards one which is going to be much more chaotic, where there is kind of fragmentation. And the U.S. for a long time tried to talk in Cold War terms to other parts of the world and talked about aligning with America and alliances and made it look like they were going to get countries to force to choose between America and China. And the Chinese, I think, were very deft at turning their absence of alliances into a source of strength and to attack Cold War thinking and to try and position themselves as defenders. Sovereignty of other players that is ringing a bit more hollow now as a result of what they're doing on rare earths and as a result of the China shock in different places. But there's still many parts of the world that have seen China and its emergence as one of the ways of emancipating themselves from reliance either on former colonial powers like the U.K. and France or the U.S. in the Western Hemisphere. And I think China's also. I think China's also done an amazing job of preparing for a world where you have a much more weaponized global economy, you know, both developing offensive instruments like rare earths, but also building up its resilience and its security. Xi Jinping has this holistic approach to national security, which basically means the securitization of everything. And if you look at the kind of vast amount of energy that's gone into making China more self-sufficient and resilient on energy when it comes to. When it comes to chips and high end computer products, when it comes to food security, it is extraordinarily impressive how much they've managed to achieve in quite a short period of time and how successful they've been at getting around the restrictions which have been placed on China and hedging and making themselves more resilient in a world which is increasingly seeing choke points being used, whether it's physical choke points like the Straits of Hormuz or choke points like the control of chips and export. And I think that the third way that they've been very successful is about looking at the parts of the world which are going to be important in the future and their kind of focus on the global south. They're understanding that as we kind of go into the 2030s, 2040s, 2050s and beyond that these countries which are very populous, which are increasingly assertive and looking at playing a different role on the world stage. Are going to be crucially important and they've really invested in that again, I think, partly from a position of weakness because they didn't have relationships with advanced democracies, which America had. But whereas during the Biden administration, there was a real convergence around the G7 and around advanced industrialized countries, China has doubled down on the countries of the future and that has been done in very creative ways by creating new institutions, doing bilaterals. But also expanding the BRICS, expanding the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, seen from a Western perspective, I think in the past people tried to see these as a kind of counter Western order, you know, to look at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as an anti-NATO, to see the BRICS as an anti-G7. But I think actually what China's been doing with these institutions is much more interesting than that. They're not trying to create a parallel order that is doing what the U.S. is doing that's providing. But it's more trying to position themselves as friends of sovereignty and status-seeking by countries who felt excluded or not necessarily well-represented in the old Western-based system. And they have a series of relationships which have been absolutely central to the hedging strategies that I described earlier, which they've developed with these other countries. And I think that what brings all these things together is the fact that China. And I think that what brings all these things together is the fact that China is expecting what Xi Jinping calls great changes unseen in a century. In other words, a world of chaos and confusion rather than a world of order. And they've been basically trying to put themselves in a position where they can benefit from that, where they have the right sorts of relationships, access to markets, to raw materials, where they're hedged in as many ways as they possibly can. And it's, you know, very different from Western powers that have either been trying to. To preserve the old order or, in Trump's case, to rip it apart without thinking about putting in place a new set of relationships which might replace it. Thank you, Mark, for that. Just a couple of things, just maybe slightly contrast. One of the things that I've learned from my colleague and friend Rush Doshi, who has probably more than anyone else helped us understand some of the language of Xi Jinping. And when he says changes unseen in a century. A century, a hundred years, he's not talking about a coming disorder, Mark. He's talking very clearly about his belief of a rising east and a declining west. He sees a different kind of order that it's China-led. He is not prescribing or believing that the coming period is going to be marked by disorder. That's the last thing that China wants to see on the global stage. The second thing I would just simply say, you are right. They are investing in some of the institutions. They are investing in some of the institutions that involve the global south. But I would say where President Xi has really doubled down is on his relationships with countries like Russia and North Korea. And that is unambiguous. And it creates deep anxieties, not just in Europe, but elsewhere. And so I don't think there is as much deft placement of the foot on global politics here as one might see. We work with countries in the global south. They have deep misgivings about areas. That also extends to China as well. The China promise of manufacturing and engagement in places like Africa has been largely unfulfilled, like other periods in the past of British, American, other countries' engagement as well. It's been largely driven by export of unrefined products and metals and the like. I will say, though, Mark, the more I listen to your piece, I find myself largely in alignment with some of your diagrams. But I think what we've tried to do is build on some of that diagnosis, a set of prescriptions about where we think the world will go. And I think we just believe there is more momentum and capacity and ballast in the boat of the alliance system that will take us through this very rough stretch of seas. Mark, can I go to you on the prescriptions that you start to get at in your essay? And one of the kind of striking contention is that. For all the talk of, you know, rupture that we heard from Mark Carney at Davos, the Canadian prime minister, most famously, but from any other sense, is that for all that talk, they don't, in fact, really get it. If leaders like Carney or, you know, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, sorry for the profusion of marks on this podcast. But, you know, if leaders like that really understood how deep the changes are in your view, what would they be doing differently? What should they be doing differently? Yeah, so I think that a lot of what's happening. Is more grief management than strategy. So people had an enormous amount vested in these institutions in this order that we've been talking about and finding it very hard to let it go and to accept that that's happening. And they're kind of more, you know, extreme examples of that are what happens at NATO summits and the kind of abject self-abasement of Mark Rutte and other people like that who are clinging to a kind of nostalgic. idea of how NATO could work and, you know, putting on a kabuki theater where people pluck random figures out of the air for spending, which have got nothing to do with capabilities. And then, you know, go through this ritual in order to impress Donald Trump in the hope that he won't withdraw troops from Europe or further undermine Article 5 by things that he's going to say. But there are all sorts of other ways where, you know, people. Are still cleaving to old institutions and hoping that the rule based order can somehow be kept alive, whether it's on trade, whether it's a two state solution on Israel, Palestine. I mean, there are a whole series of things which were very much part of the consensus about what order should look like for the last couple of decades, where the gulf between the reality of our world and what is codified in these documents and strategies is becoming undefined. And rather than adjusting to the way that things really are, there's often an attempt to try and keep these things alive. And that's true in different areas. So, you know, on security, I think it is essential that European countries accelerate the process of working out to defend themselves without America. You know, it's pretty difficult for me to explain to my kids why 350 million Americans should be paying for the security of 500 million Europeans, you know. In 2026, let alone in the future. And they should be. decreasing their dependence on the U.S. in the technology area as well. The fact that the American president could cut off European access to Fable and to Mythos and things like that, you know, it shows that it's an extremely dangerous thing to have to rely on operating systems, which are increasingly being nationalized and where decisions are being made which are beyond your control. You need to build up your capacity to engage in economic statecraft in a way that is much more unilateral if you're the European Union than you have in the past. Because it's clear that when the U.S. and China come to blows with each other, nobody's fighting for European interests in these things. And actually, even when the Biden administration was in place on those big structural issues to do with economic imbalances and the relationship between China, it's largely a bilateral one. And the cooperation is only at the margins on different areas. There are areas where there's a complete overlap between European and American interests. And I think, you know, we should always work together when that happens. But there are also quite big divergences. I think that there's also a tendency to think about creating bodies and institutions which are universal, which everyone's going to be part of, and which are there for a very long time. But I think part of the Chinese genius has been about, you know, being much more experimental, trying different things out, messing around with membership of different things, not thinking so much about the institutional logic behind any kind of institution, but being more sort of opportunistic about how you bring countries together and do different things. And Europeans and Asians and other countries need to do a lot more of that. But I think, you know, where I think Mark Carney is right is to think that middle players can play an important role in helping each other hedge in a world without order, where you're facing coercion from Donald Trump, from Xi Jinping, from Putin, and you can kind of help each other a little bit. But what you're not going to be able to do is to create any kind of system. And where I think the main divergence between Kurt and Russia and myself is, is not that we disagree that alliances are going to be super important and be around in the future, but it's whether there's going to be any system which is underpinned by these alliances. I think we can have loads of alliances, probably even more alliances, but we're not going to be able to have more alliances than we've had in the past. But they're going to be much thinner than the kind of alliances which characterize the Cold War and the post-Cold War. They're going to be much less load-bearing and much more transactional and, you know, probably a lot messier. And I think that is like a rational response to a world without order, that you try and work with others where your interests coincide with each other. And then you can build real, much thicker communities in a way that you can work with each other. So, I think that's going to be something that's going to be more integrated and stronger and more values-based. But the relationship between European countries and the U.S. and Japan and other places is going to be important, but it's going to have a very different nature from what gets done within a regional alliance like the European Union. Before we close, I want to press all three of you to consider what might change or subvert the arguments that the core of your analysis were, I guess, about halfway through Trump's second term. As you imagine the next couple of years, what will change the outcome that you expect based on what Trump does and how allies respond over this couple of years? I think, Kurt and Rush, this is really about the kind of self-fulfilling prophecy you've worn of. And then, Mark, I'm interested in how you see a path to a somewhat less dire outcome than the picture the piece paints. Kurt and Rush, let's start with you on what might lead us to a worse place when it comes to alliances. Well, look, let me just make a few quick points. I think, first of all, if there is some kind of use of force against an ally, like in Greenland, that would be catastrophic to the alliance system. It may be unrecoverable if that occurs. I don't think that's likely, but it's not impossible, but it's quite unlikely. President Trump said he wouldn't do it. Leaders of the Republican Party have suggested that they think it's a bad idea, that they wouldn't support it. And so I think we often talk about that incredible example, but it is highly personalistic and highly anomalous. Put that example to the side, then. The other more likely path to a problem is that that fatalism we talked about sets in. The conventional wisdom becomes the alliances are unrecoverable, the hedging has gone so far that the alliance system will never be reconstituted, nobody will ever trust the U.S. again, and that, therefore, we shouldn't try to find new ways to work together. That argument, I think, is dangerous. And I think it's wrong. And I think it misses that reality matters, yes, obviously, but reality is also shaped in part by perceptions, which is kind of a tricky inversion of the normal relationship between the two. Our shared views on what's possible and what the future will bring are not the same. And I think it's wrong to think that what's possible and what the future will bring can become a reality themselves. And so when we say the alliances will change, the answer is obviously that that's correct. When we say we can't go back, that's correct. But the question of what comes next shouldn't be, ah, it will be, you know, thin and weak and pathetic and pointless, because the challenges that the alliances are facing are quite significant, existential even. The world that we're going to see might end up being Chinese partial preeminence means there's more reason to get together. And let me end with this, Dan. I think it's not so hard to believe there's a path to get through this. And I think it's not so hard to believe there's a path to get through this. And I think it's not so hard to believe there's You asked Mark, what are his prescriptions? Here are some of ours, right? Whatever happens in the midterm elections, there's going to be a conversation about what comes next. Part of that conversation is going to be, how do we turn the page on this period of tension? Part of that answer is going to be trying to rebuild trust, reassuring Europeans that what they saw, and Asian allies, I should clarify, alike, was anomalous and maybe the product of a personality more than a sustained policy. And I think that that's an argument that can be credibly made depending on how the election turns out. But the second piece, which we haven't talked about, is that, I think to Mark's point, we may not have a brand new system we're able to, you know, take out of the bag and remove the wrapping paper, and here it is, right? I mean, it's ready to go. I think we're going to have to build things iteratively and humbly and modestly. What does that mean in practice? I think it means a lot of smaller sectoral agreements in areas where we want to see cooperation. It might be in some industrial areas, some areas where China has advantages. It might be choke points like rare earths or pharmaceuticals. It might be in future technologies like, you know, the drone industry or electric batteries. Is it going to be a very, very large space? I think it's so hard to believe that a handful of countries in a plurilateral fashion could get together and work together to be able to bring capacity online in those spaces. I don't think that's that hard to imagine. And there's similar arguments you could make on the security side. It's true. The trends in warfare towards precision and lethality and range and autonomy all make it easier for Iran to disrupt a strait, but they also make it easier for Ukraine to resist the Russians or for Asians to resist a massive amphibious invasion or air power from China. And so there's many opportunities for collaboration on the future of defense technology. Could we see sectoral cooperation there? Yes. And if we have enough small wins at the sectoral level, we can do bigger things. So the agenda of the future, I think, is in large part figuring out where we can get those quick wins, where we can build on those quick wins, what the politics is going to be domestically to ensure alliance momentum. If we are able to make these deals that are mutually beneficial and that also create mutual dependency. Again, it's not the case purely that Europe is dependent on the U.S. in all manners. In many ways, the U.S. is also increasingly dependent on Europe. The same is true for Japan and Taiwan. There is no high-tech American AI buildout without this allied ecosystem. And the same is going to be true in other sectors like biotechnology, where the U.S. doesn't have the capability that the Koreans might have in some areas or that Eastern Europeans have in pharmaceutical manufacturing. Let me end with one other thing. I think, as Kurt mentioned at the beginning of this conversation, the U.S. is reasonably the U.S. will also have to do more. The view is America doesn't have the resources to do more. Therefore, it won't. But in many areas, doing more doesn't necessarily mean expending more resources. It means doing better coordination. It means breaking down barriers between each other on technology transfer or industrial cooperation. And that kind of positive sum vision for the alliances, I think, is quite reasonable. It's necessary. It's essential. And the failure mode there, I think, is largely our own unwillingness to seize it. The things that would really concern me, I think, is that we're starting to see even a more erratic and in some ways, you know, absolutely dramatic set of rhetorical claims on the part of the president that are often not followed up on. So threats and then nothing. He's oftentimes talked about pulling out of NATO, but we've seen very little actually practical that comes thereafter. If he actually took steps to withdraw the United States from NATO, that would be a very, very bad thing. And I think that's a very, very bad thing. It would be a very hard thing to recover from, like a potential military action against an ally like Greenland. I would also say, I do worry that the continuation of the conflict in the Gulf creates larger concerns. This is not the first time that the United States has embarked on a exotic military campaign. Far from it. Mark talked about Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The surprising challenge here is that President Trump made very clear that he was not going to entertain military adventurism of the kind that he's involved in directly right now in Iran. But if anything, he is underestimating the consequences of this. We've been able, because of larger reserves that have built up over time, fertilizer and petrochemicals, sulfur and a variety of other things, to be able to continue with these disruptions. That is not the case. The global economy is basically kind of teetering right now. If the conflict continues, the shortages will start to really play out on the global economy in a way that could be very difficult for us. And we have a lot of things to grapple with, but a global recession at this juncture would just complicate all of our endeavors going forward. Then, Mark, let me ask you to close to try to imagine reflecting back on this stretch from, let's say, 10 years in the future. If things are not as dire as you assume right now, what might you have gotten wrong? Well, I don't necessarily think everything's dire. What I'm talking about is a world in transition, right? The way that things have been done for the last period of time are coming to an end. And in its place, people are going to develop new ways of working. And there could be some very bad. And scary things. And in the piece, I kind of talk about some of the scary things that might happen as a result of fragmentation and contagion and strangulation. And you can imagine the world becoming much more dangerous. We've seen the kind of hollowing out of a lot of the rules of engagement, where civilians are being targeted in different conflicts, and there's a kind of expansion of territorial wars. And there isn't much of a desire to come up with cooperative solutions to. To problems that can't cross borders. But at the same time, what I'm positive about is that countries are kind of slowly waking up to the fact that these trends have been around for a while, and they're developing responses to it. And some of the things that, if you have a kind of old-fashioned way of looking at the world, look really bad, might actually look quite good. So one very good area of that is proliferation, for example, where there's been a sort of norm against proliferation before. We thought that a world with more nuclear weapons would be a less safe one. But actually, having some sort of managed proliferation, where, for example, if Germany and Poland work with France and the UK to develop capacity to deter Russia, that's not a kind of terrible thing. If there's a bit of proliferation in Asia, with Japan and Korea, relying less on the US, it's not necessarily going to be a kind of catastrophic thing to have a bit more resilience from that perspective. I think that there's a lot of overlap between what Rush was saying about the future of the alliance system and where I kind of end my piece, because I say that we need to move from thinking in grand architectural terms, where you have big blueprints towards thinking more like artisans, you know, trying different things out in different areas and seeing what works, and that you could have a kind of a whole tapestry of different plurilateral arrangements between different players in different things. You know, I think it's. less tidy and maybe suboptimal compared to having a perfectly functioning global system, but it's certainly better than total anarchy and chaos. And I think there are going to be more and more things like that that are emerging. I do think that there are also positive things that come out of this new mindset, which a lot of these countries that were very reliant on the US, and they're now having to do things for themselves. There could be positive geopolitical decisions that come out of those things. I think it's very important that we develop a new European security order. And one of the most disastrous things that has happened recently is the fact that Europeans have been unable to work out what their model for a kind of post-war Europe looks like, and have been relying on, you know, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner and J.D. Vance to negotiate with the Russians on their behalf. And to try and work out what a European security order should look like. But I think if Europeans both developing more capacity, and therefore Russia is forced to take them more seriously, and they can develop their own conversations with the Russians and the Turks, you're more likely to have some kind of stable and durable peace that comes after the end of this tragic war in Ukraine. I think in the Gulf, one of the very positive things that's happened in recent times as the U.S. has withdrawn from playing the role that it did earlier was to see new diplomatic relations emerge between the Saudis and the Iranians. And I know Jake Sullivan got in a lot of trouble for writing an essay for you, Dan, just a few days before the 7th of October, where he was talking about how the Middle East was becoming kind of more orderly. But actually, one of the reasons why things haven't been as catastrophic as they could have been with this war is because Saudi Arabia and Iran have maintained channels and have got ways of working together in different ways. And I think if different American allies and regional players develop more responsibility for their own security and build up a set of relationships with each other, rather than simply relying on the U.S. to be the providers of order, that is something which could be quite positive as well. But, you know, there are lots of things that could go disastrously wrong. And the biggest thing, I think, is to do with domestic politics everywhere. And I think that's one of the things that, you know, we've talked about who wins the elections in the U.S. and what happens in the midterms. But you've got a lot of politics in every other part of the world as well. And certainly in Europe, you know, you've got far-right parties which are leading the opinion polls in most of the big countries. You've got quite scary political trends taking place in many other countries. And I think that's one of the things that's going on in the world. And I think that one of the big questions is how this much more chaotic and dangerous international order intersects with more fragmented and polarized national political systems. And unfortunately, you know, they're both pushing us away from cooperative, long-lasting institutional responses to the things which are going on in the world and making things more volatile and more dangerous. And I think the most dangerous thing is if you get this kind of negative feedback loop between a much more dangerous and scary world and then, you know, ethno-nationalist parties coming to power in great powers. And that could really take us into a much more tragic situation than where we are at the moment. Fair. We almost ended on a note of glowing transatlantic allied convergence. But I suppose that's just not where we are. But thanks to all three of you guys. That was a really rich conversation. Both essays are fantastic. Kurt and Rush, How Alliance Survived. Mark, yours is The Abandoned Order, both well worth reading in our new issue and on our website. So thanks so much. Thank you so much, Dan. Thanks. Thank you, Dan. Thank you for listening. You can find the articles that we discussed on today's show at foreignaffairs.com. This episode of the Foreign Affairs Interview was produced by Elise Burr and Kanishk Tharoor. Our audio engineer is Christopher Cook. Original music is by Robin Hilton. Special thanks as well to Irina Hogan. Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you like what you heard, please take a minute to rate and review it. We release a new show every Thursday. Thanks again for tuning in. We hope you enjoyed this episode of the Foreign Affairs Interview. Don't forget to visit foreignaffairs.com slash spotlight to sign up for Dan Kurtz-Valen's free weekly newsletter, featuring more of the clear-headed analysis that you enjoy here on the podcast. 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