The Coming Battles Over American Foreign Policy: A Conversation With Kori Schake and Thomas Wright

I'm Dan Kurtz-Phalen, and this is the Foreign Affairs Interview. One of the things the election showed us is that there was a backlash against Trump administration policies, even if people supported the principles. And I think that's likely to play out a lot in future conservative debates. I would expect in general terms that the start of the primary campaign will be accompanied by a slew of purity tests that different groups will put forward. You know, do you commit not to hire anyone from the last administration? Or do you commit not to hire anyone from the defense industry or the tech industry? Or do you commit to this or that in sort of a yes-no way? And I certainly hope that the candidates basically refuse to answer any of those tests. The Democrats' sweeping victory in midterm elections this week marks the start of not just a new phase for Donald Trump's foreign policy. It will also kick off a more intensive discussion among both Democrats and Republicans about the future of American foreign policy beyond Trump. I wanted to speak with two foreign policy veterans who have participated in these debates inside and outside of government, including in the pages of Foreign Affairs. Corey Shockey, the director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, served in the State Department and on the National Security Council under George W. Bush. Tom Wright was senior director for strategic planning at the National Security Council. Tom Wright was senior director for strategic planning at the National Security Council under Joe Biden and is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. All of these debates will have to contend with big questions about specific policies from China and the Middle East to AI and defense spending. They also involve deep and often bitter fissures both between and within parties. Meanwhile, the war in Iran is far from resolved, and the specter of an already unpredictable president's lame duck period introduces even more uncertainty about what the world will look like when Trump leaves the White House for good in January 2029. Corey, Tom, great to have you both on the podcast. Thank you, my friend. I'm looking forward to it. Thanks, Dan. It's great to be here. We're recording this on the afternoon of November 4th, the day after midterm elections. These debates would be getting going in any case, but the sheer extent, the surprising extent of Democratic victories in both the House and the Senate, I think, are going to be a lot more important than ever. I think it will supercharge the fight both between Congress and the executive and between factions within each to shape foreign policy over the next two years, and I think even more the fight to shape the future of both Democratic and Republican foreign policies after Trump. It also seems likely to mark the start of a more kind of intensive effort to understand what lasting marks the Trump foreign policy will leave on America's role in the world going forward. I want to focus most of our discussion on those longer-term questions, but given what's front of mind for most people today, let's first address the midterms and the wake and what this means for Trump foreign policy going forward. I think it's first worth lingering on the extent to which the foreign policy issues really were quite central to the midterms. It's not what we usually expect. Corey, J.D. Vance said rather bluntly, kind of shockingly bluntly, given that he is the sitting vice president, that the Iran war is to blame for Republican losses. What's your analysis of that at that point, and what do you make of Vance putting it so bluntly the day after the election? Well, I think it is partly true that the affordability concerns that American voters have were exacerbated by the Iran war, but they weren't caused by the Iran war. They were caused by tariffs. They were caused by a whole host of Trump administration policies. And I agree with you, Dan, that foreign policy has played an outsized role. It's typically marginal in American elections, but because the indicators are so clear that tariffs and allied exasperation and bad choices about who to partner with and the Iran war directly have affected the affordability issues that voters are concerned about, and Democrats were smart enough to campaign on that connection, I think foreign policies played an outsized role. To answer the political question, no, I'm not surprised that Vice President Vance has won the election. I'm not surprised that he's won the election. I'm not surprised that he's been trying to position himself as a supporter of the president, but not the president's policy choices. But I think he's unlikely to be able to tear the jersey off effectively. It does, however, seem meaningful that he sees this as the politically advantageous position to take more clearly now than he has in the past at this particular moment. Yeah, well, I mean, he started laying the groundwork with the leaks to journalists about his opposition to the war in the run-up to the election. And I think that's a very important point. And so this is a natural continuation of his desire to capture the president's supporters, not alienate the president's supporters by criticizing the president, but acting like the policies are somehow independent of administration choices. Tom, you both follow very closely and take part in Democratic discussions about how to use newfound power in both houses of Congress to shape and constrain Trump's foreign policy. Over the next couple of years, what can they do? What can Democrats do? And what do you think they should do with that power? Yeah, you know, I think the conventional wisdom, which is, there's a large kernel of truth to it, is that it's hard to constrain the president on foreign policy, that there's enormous executive discretion there. Presidents tend to pivot toward the international, you know, in their final sort of two years. You know, Trump has already done that. He's likely to continue to do that. He won't have that much power to achieve a domestic agenda, so he may try to do it internationally. And I think, you know, that is a reality. That said, you know, while the switching of Congress may not be transformative, it won't lead to a transformation in U.S. foreign policy, I think it will achieve like a number of things. Firstly, you know, if senior officials leave, there'll be massive confirmation flights over who represents them. And I think that's going to be a factor. I think that's going to be a factor. If Hexec goes, you know, that will be pretty transformative in the Pentagon. I think no matter who goes in, even if it's in acting, probably will be quite different. Same with Rubio in terms of the replacement mattering. So I think there will be some impact on personnel, but I also think on appropriations, clearly, you know, with the Iran war, you know, that will be a factor. I think we'll see hearings. Trump may refuse to have any of his officials participate in those hearings. I think that's going to be a bit of a precedent for that from his first term, you know, but you will see people from the private sector, the officers who were purged from the military and by Hexec and others all testifying. And then I think you'll see some reports, official congressional reports into like Russia's shadow war or Russia's campaign in Ukraine over the winter. All of those things will raise the profile. So there'll be a lot of stuff that I think is a little bit more than symbolic. I thought it was interesting when Trump spoke just on the night of the election to Fox, you know, he was sort of talking about ways to find common ground and he didn't really know what that was. And he spent most of his time saying what he wouldn't work on. But I think there are a couple of examples on the foreign policy side where there are near veto proof majorities already. And I think he might, you know, be able to find common ground. And I think there are a couple of examples on the foreign policy side where there are near veto proof majorities already. And I think there's a strong desire to sort of push back against the David Sachs, Jensen Wang sort of theory of the case on China. And this is about keeping high end chips away from Chinese companies and Chinese uses. Yeah. And not just high end chips, increasingly semiconductor manufacturing equipment and ways to broaden that out. And also to just ensure implementation. I mean, the Commerce Department has been completely gutted in its capability to actually implement the controls that are already on the books. So that will be one sort of issue area. I don't think Trump is ever really that, you know, opposed to the export controls. He certainly wasn't committed to them. So I think he's a little bit more agnostic. He's sort of been taken in by Sachs and Wang on this stuff. That will be one. I think potentially Ukraine is another, not that he will fundamentally change his position, but there's enormous bipartisan, you know, support for more support for Ukraine. And that could be on appropriations. There was some money appropriated in the first two years. He refused to spend it. They could take him to court. They could appropriate more money. You know, there's a few other things that could be done to help Ukraine a little bit more. All of this is sort of on the margin. Like it's not that he's going to turn in into, you know, a full supporter, an ally of Ukraine overnight. But, you know, these nuances, I think, do matter and could make a difference. So I think on those, there's the potential for some positive change on the margins. I think on that is a terrible move. First of all, it's not going to produce anything, right? Because what they are going to say is the textbook civil military answer, the president has the authority to fire any senior military officer. your military officer they want. And also, what are they going to say? I objected to his Afghan policy. The military is supposed to carry out policies they don't agree with. So I would just encourage friends who are looking for accountability on military issues to start at the top, the people who issue the orders, the president, the secretary of defense who transmits the orders. That's where to focus, because the problem is the unprincipled principle. And grilling recently retired military officers isn't going to produce the outcome that I think people would like it to, and it's going to put them in a terrible position. And why, to your mind, is that so dangerous for civil-military relations? What would the damage be? Well, because the two tests of whether the American system of civil-military relations are properly functioning are, first, can the president fire any military officer they want? And second, will the military control the military? And third, will the military control the military? And fourth, will the military carry out policies they don't agree with? And we are looking at the cashiering of an enormous wealth of military talent. And it's wrong to do, but they have the right to do it. And the military's responsibility is to keep their mouth shut about policies they don't agree with. Corey, how do you expect Trump to react to both the electoral consequences, but also democratic attempts to take some of the steps that Tom was laying out? We can, believe, civil-military issues aside for the moment. But do you expect him to lash out, to be conciliatory? Where do you think he might focus if the expectation that foreign policy will be a relatively less constrained place for the next couple of years turns out to be true? I was genuinely surprised that the president was attempting to sound conciliatory last night. And so that would be an unexpected move on the president's part. But of course, the way he has governed for the first two years of his term will make any, any cross-party cooperation much more difficult to achieve. I think perhaps the most, the bellwether of potential for bipartisan moves is actually whether the OMB director, Russ Vought, keeps his job. Because he has been the driver of, you know, no democratic votes on legislation is what we want in the Trump administration. And reconciliation, as a partisan political move instead of gaining bipartisan political support. So I think he's likely to be both an impediment to that kind of cooperation, which the president sounded last night like he was interested in, and also one of the most difficult people for Democrats to find common ground with. But I would defer to Tom on what Democrats think. Yeah, I think there's, in the first two years, I think it wasn't just that they didn't want Democratic votes. I mean, Democrats are cut out of briefings. You know, when Hexet would go up, he wouldn't talk with Democratic leadership. So there was a general sort of icing out of Democrats in, just in principle, almost. And obviously, now, if the administration wants to work with Congress, they're going to have to work with Democrats. And I think there's a legislative part of that. There's also just a daily sort of part of that as well. So I think, you know, I think it's, I wouldn't expect all that much cooperation. But I was just saying that there is the potential if he wants to, you know, work on a few issues to show that there's some progress. There are some that actually have probably majority support on his own side, maybe not in the White House itself, but amongst Republicans in Congress, especially on the on the export controls bit. I think, you know, I think there's he might also do certain things that would not be militarily risky, but would be politically risky or diplomatically risky. So I would look at sort of North Korea, you know, would he recognize North Korea as a nuclear state and have a meeting with Kim and try to, you know, build a partnership there and pull back more significantly from South Korea. That's the type of thing he could do that he might think is in keeping. with past practice and also for his legacy. And that would obviously raise a lot of concerns, not just amongst Democrats, but I think amongst Republicans, too. So, you know, I think a lot was made before the election about, you know, will he escalate massively in Iran? I think that's unlikely. I thought it was unlikely before. I think now, especially given what we've seen from Vance, but also from Trump himself talking about sort of accepting the results and and talking about Iran being a part of it. I think he'll try to do that. I think he'll try to sell that as, you know, relatively quickly. We may see some demonstrative escalation, but I think really meaningful escalation seems unlikely. Corey, what's your expectation about what they're likely to do in Iran, given all the signaling and chest-thumping about escalation to come before the election? The president's been all over the map on this, and it's actually discredited his attempts to deter Iranian attacks on shipping in the strait. I think the fact that the president's strategy is unclear, that he has played himself into a position where he has only three choices. One, dramatically escalate in a way that changes the Iranian political calculus to persuade them they are not winning. I agree with Tom that that's pretty unlikely, given how significant an escalation that would take. The second alternative the president has is to pretend he's won and quit. But that still leaves the Straits of Hormuz closed. So I think that's unlikely, which only leaves the third alternative, which is the low-grade fever alternative of keeping this running for as long as he can until either the Iranian government begins to crumble or the U.S. runs out of munitions. And hard to say which of those two things would happen first. So I think it's likely. It's likely that we're going to see more of the same, including the president's very messy and contradictory messaging. To your mind, Corey, is more of the same the best option? I mean, leaving aside the contradictory messaging, is that, given where we are, the best course for the United States at this point? I think there are no good courses, obviously. But, you know, I'm in favor of actually winning wars if you're going to start them. And I think either capitulating or the low-grade fever are worse options. I think there are better options than trying to craft a fallback position where, for example, instead of trying to overthrow the Iranian government or that we focus on freedom of navigation and then apologize to all of our friends in the region and all of our allies in the world and ask them to come help us to create a regime of freedom of passage through both the United States and the United States, I don't think that's the best option available. But I don't think it likely the president would make those choices. Tom, let me go back to Ukraine before we try to look a little bit further into the future. You mentioned some bipartisan possibility on the Hill around Ukraine, but you could easily imagine the administration and the president being kind of refocusing on their, you know, long-stated desire to end the war in ways that, you know, all of you in the Biden administration, as they tell it, failed to do or didn't even try to do. Could you imagine a kind of sharpened effort to constrain Zelensky? And we've seen a lot in the last few weeks to put pressure on the Ukrainians from cutting off Starlink and perhaps cutting off some of the intelligence support to giving these deals to Putin and doing a lot to try to bring Putin around. Could you imagine them trying something there? And if so, what effect might that have on the war? Yeah, I mean, I think they have tried it, you know, and I think they've continually had this zigzag process. And I think they've continually had this zigzag process. I think he has a pathway. My basic take on the war right now is there's a 50% chance this war is still going on in 2029, in which case it probably goes on as long as Putin is alive and in office, right? There's about a 10%, 15% chance the Russians actually, you know, are able to impose their own terms on Ukraine. I don't think that's likely, but I don't rule it out over sort of a year or two. And then I think there is a 35, 40% chance of it ending next spring or summer. And I think the reason for that would be, you know, he can't make gains. There's asymmetrical attrition. Ukraine still has a long-wind strike. Ukraine has survived the winter, and that's not going to change. But also crucially, and I think especially after last night, that he would worry that a future president may be more pro-Ukraine and will give him a worse deal than Trump will give. And then it becomes a little bit binding. And I think that's a good thing. for him, right? Because then his choices are end the war next year. have a full lifting of sanctions, rejoin the G7, which is in the draft of the agreement, you know, maybe don't get territorial, additional territorial concessions, but a freezing of the lines, no Ukraine and NATO, and then a full reset with Trump. Trump goes to Moscow, there's a big ceremony, you know, maybe Putin comes here. They have all these business deals that they, you know, have wanted to do for ages with Wyckoff and Dmitriyev, and also Putin can whisper in Trump's ear during the 18 months that he'd have left about why do you need troops in Europe since we're not fighting anymore, and sort of try to undermine NATO from within, and then see what he can get from all of that. And then when a pro-Ukraine president comes in, if they do, then reconsider whether to restart the war at that point, right? And so I think that is possible. I think net-net, that's very messy. Is it good for Ukraine? Probably. Probably good for them to have an end to the war. And so I think you may see, and I think they are aware that they potentially have a window after the winter campaign to end it. And so I know the allies are sort of pushing him to, you know, you need to think about creating the conditions for a successful deal, and those conditions are much more about Putin's mindset than they are about Zelensky's. And I don't know, you know, he's not very disciplined on this. He always tends to put in. He's always trying to put pressure on Zelensky. He's got this idea of Russian invincibility militarily that's completely wrong. I think I'm proven to be wrong. But I think there is a pathway, and that he would get some credit for that, like, because he could then say, I ended the war in my term. And so I think that is, you know, the hill, I think, needs to be trying to pressure him in that direction, and then also trying to refine the deal so it's actually okay, right? Because obviously, Ukraine. Ukraine can't accept the deal that was on the table from last November or this spring, so it needs to be different. It's still not going to be great, but it may be sort of acceptable or tolerable. So governors and Congress have the ability to weigh in in really significant ways. I mean, I thought it was striking that the governor of New Jersey made public that any importation of Russian diesel would be a violation of the law. And so would be prevented in Jersey ports. Congress actually controls funding and authorization for where U.S. troops are stationed. They can prevent the president and have, in the National Defense Authorization Act several times, set a floor of troop numbers in Europe and in Asia. And I think we're likely to see a lot more of that kind of activism. I also wouldn't be surprised to see a Democratic Congress. Right. offer aid to Ukraine and then fight with the administration if the administration refuses to enact it. And again, there's a precedent for that with the $400 million that Congress has already authorized and appropriated. It's the two other areas where I can imagine Trump spending some time and putting some energy into in the next couple of years. The first would be in Latin America, a place where I think he believes his agenda has been relatively successful. Right. There's a renewed push on Cuba or, you know, more boat strikes in the Caribbean or anything else. You can also imagine him withdrawing troops from various places in Europe and Asia, driven as much by kind of, you know, peak as anything else. But either of those seems like it could drive some more enduring changes, some more meaningful change. I suspect one of the areas where a Democratic Congress is likely to force an enormous amount of oversight is on the boat strikes and military involvement in the Caribbean. Right. Right. Right. Right. And more broadly in Ecuador and potentially other places in Latin America. So I could see Congress getting very Article I over that and then fighting with the administration about the troop stationing because, again, Congress has that authority. They just have rarely exercised it in the current Congress. We'll return to my conversation with Corey Shockey and Tom Wright after a short break. Global policy is not shaped only inside the Bellway. At the UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy, ranked among the nation's top public universities, we deliver the quantitative tools, regional policy expertise, and fresh West Coast perspective needed to lead emerging transformations. The world is resetting, and your skills should too. From artificial intelligence governance to changing Pacific trade, global policy is being rewritten in real time. Advance your global career at gps.ucsd.edu. Georgetown University Press presents The Russian General Staff by Oskar Janssen. This new book sheds light on the most important military institution in Putin's Russia. By understanding the functioning of the military's leadership and its relation to policy, the reasons for Russia's poor performance in the war become clear. Janssen provides an anatomy of this institution and its core functions, with analysis rooted in over a dozen years of research, fieldwork, and interviews on the Russian military. The Russian General Staff is available for purchase at press.georgetown.edu and select bookstores. I'm going to turn to some of the more forward-looking debates beyond just these next couple of years. It strikes me that so many of the arguments about the future of U.S. foreign policy, whether in Republican or Democratic circles or more generally, rest on certain assumptions, often unstated assumptions, about how much Trump will leave behind enduring changes to American relationships globally, to tools of national power, to global order. Corey, I think back to a piece you wrote for Foreign Affairs last year, relatively early in Trump's second term. You posed the question, and I'll quote you here, many have speculated about whether or to what degree the United States will withdraw from its leading role in the world. But a more pressing question might be, what if the rest of the world beats Washington to the punch, withdrawing from the cooperative U.S.-led order that has been the bedrock of American power? A little more than a year after you wrote that, what's your answer to that question, albeit still a provisional one at this point? So I do think we see not just America's enemies or countries without particular ties to the United States, but we see America's closest allies looking to secure their supply chains against American weaponization of our involvement in them. I mean, Europeans are seriously exploring, is there a European way of war, a way to effectively defend themselves and their interests without American involvement? I think there's South Koreans softening towards North Korea and China. Japan probably doesn't have a non-American option. I mean, in Canada, Prime Minister Carney's playing a weak hand extraordinarily adroitly. And so we are seeing hedging against vulnerability to American power. But I do think that the resounding electoral defeat that the president and my fellow Republicans experienced in the election earlier this week will make it less likely that particularly America's close friends continue on that path. Because there's a reason. There's a reason that countries have allowed this amount of reliance on the United States. Because repairing it is extraordinarily expensive and in many cases incredibly dangerous. And so there's going to be a lot of hope that the United States will behave better and more reliably. And therefore Germany doesn't have to upend its domestic policy in order to fund a much more robust defense. I think everybody. I think everybody's going to want to revert to the mean if a revert to the mean is possible. What about the middle powers that have gotten so much attention since Mark Carney's speech at Davos earlier this year where he described the rupture? Do you see meaningful changes to order into U.S. options given what middle powers are doing to hedge? Some of them U.S. allies, some of them not. So I really admire the attempt. But I do think many allies will privately admit that. That there's not a middle power alternative to replacing American power. They can attempt to shore up and buy time. And I actually think that's what Prime Minister Carney is doing. By looking to demonstrate alternatives to cause the United States to recalibrate and return to a more cooperative, more mutually beneficial approach. Because I think actually it's very hard to get. I think it's very hard to get. To surpass the problem of getting small and middle-sized countries all aligned in the time frame you need to push back on American policy. Tom, I'm interested in your view of what changes from the four years of Trump's second term foreign policy, which of those changes are likely to be enduring, how that changes international order and U.S. options going forward. I would note that in your new piece just published this week for Foreign Affairs, you predict that the strategic environment in 2029 is on track to be. The most difficult and unforgiving since the height of the Cold War. Imagine some of that has to do with the changes we will have. seen in these four years? Yeah, I mean, I think obviously no one knows where we will be. And I think a lot of things that Trump is doing are reversible because of just the authority in the office of the president. You know, many of it can be reversed. A lot of it will take time, particularly trying to fix and restore domestic institutions, which I think have been fundamentally broken and gutted. Some formally abolished, others like the Pentagon, I think, in a real crisis after probably the weakest leadership in modern history. So I think there's a lot of different pieces, the intelligence part as well, of course. There's a lot of things that will be very difficult to fix. And when an incoming team comes in, they may find that they just don't have the type of capacity that they were used to when they were in before. So I think that's repairable, but I think it's also will be a heavy lift. I think internationally, like we are on track and not just because of Trump, but I think he's obviously contributed to it. But I think it was already underway for, I think, a really, really difficult sort of period because we may have wars in Europe and the Middle East continuing. I think it's quite possible the war in Ukraine is still happening and it's quite possible the war with Iran is still happening and wars can have, you know, a life of their own in that they can develop, even if they seem static, they can have ripple effects and more than ripple effects that can be destabilizing. I think we end up with, you know, we have a set of world leaders, I think that including Trump, but in many others who are erratic, some of them are aging, some of them are in a hurry and seem quite ambitious and worry about closing windows of opportunity. We see sort of nationalism and rivalry, you know, a very high point. I don't know if it's the highest since the 60s or before that, or a little bit after, but it's definitely very historically significant. And then I think in the Democratic Party, we don't really know what type of president will come in. Is it someone who basically, you know, wants to sort of shield America from all of that and sort of focus on the domestic and not do that much internationally, not take sort of big risks or make big plays? Or is it someone who is sort of wielding that power a little bit more, you know, assertively, and that will contribute to the type of environment that's there? So I think it's quite possible it will be a period of crisis or near crisis, when actually that the, you know, we also have the munitions deficit as well, which affects deterrence. And I think we have to assume, not the worst, but we have to assume a pretty bad case. And if it's better, that's great, you know, but it's quite possible it would be hard. And I think in that environment, there's even setting aside Trump, that would be very difficult to manage. And then if you add on top of it, the damage done to alliances, the opening given to, you know, Russia and to China, the erosion of, you know, everything from the export controls to the sanctions regime, not always formally, but often in the implementation, I think all of this sort of combines. I would say one thing where I do, I guess, disagree with Corey a little bit is I think on the alliances, obviously, an enormous amount of damage has been done. But the story of the alliances in Europe and Asia has been that they are bending over backwards, to accommodate and work with Trump. And I find it hard to believe that they won't also want to work with a new administration. I think the reason why they wanted to work with Trump is the same they'd want to work with an incoming administration, which is they're terrified of their external environment. I think if we were living in the 1990s, the alliances probably would have formally collapsed by now because countries wouldn't have felt the need for them and they would be so aggrieved at Trump's actions that they would have seriously hedged or gone in another way. But Europe doesn't really have, they have Russia there, that's not going to change. And in the Indo-Pacific, they're increasingly obviously worried about China and that's not going to change. And they're trying to do their own thing for sure, but we could have a Marine Le Pen president. I think even without her, Europe is struggling. I think they're doing a good job. They're trying, but they have budgets to pass. They have elections to be reelected in. All of those things are contingent and difficult. And there's also obviously, issues in the Indo-Pacific as well. So I think that indispensability, I don't know if that's the right term anymore, but I still think it's essentially true that the US has sort of a role that is unique and others need cooperation. And we have to renegotiate the arrangement, obviously not just because of Trump, but also for all sorts of other reasons. And it's doable, but I think that will be a very significant challenge for the new administration. Corey, you warned in that piece, which appropriately is called, Dispensable, against a failure of imagination, you know, to imagine that, or to fail to see how much change is possible and how quickly these things can break. Not to be too heavy handed and stoking disagreement here, but is Tom's position a failure of imagination that you would worry about? I do think that lots of damage has been done. I think the failure of imagination though, isn't on Tom, it's actually on the Trump administration. So where I do disagree a little bit with Tom is that allies may not have better options than reliance on the United States, even when we are unreliable, but they do have other options. And the Trump administration's failure of imagination is failing to think that countries will make decisions that are not in our interests and may not even be in their interests, but the fevered pitch of the moment or the fear of the moment or the need to make a decision can cause countries to make choices that aren't in their interests and aren't in ours. The Trump administration seems to think that no matter what we do, nobody has a choice but to cooperate with us or concede to us. And actually there are lots of other bad alternatives. And I think we see some of those emerging, right? Like I think we see the countries of the Gulf, the Saudis and others, trying to negotiate an arrangement with Iran that excludes them from the American equation. And that's not in our interests. That may not even be in their interests, but they are so distrusting of us that they are making bad choices. And I think the Trump administration just can't imagine that there's that much agency that others have. Corey, let me also get your view on the munitions problem that Tom mentioned briefly. Stats on this are pretty staggering when you see it, even just the public ones, when it comes to the sheer number of air defense interceptors we've used, the depleted stocks of almost everything we need. How do you think that constrains U.S. And I suppose, especially in Asia, I mean, there's the risk of a deterrence failure seems significantly higher now than it might've been a couple of years ago. Well, there certainly are munitions shortfalls. And it's a bipartisan problem of, at least a decade in the making. But that problem is made worse by the Trump administration because the funding for repairing the munition shortfalls was anticipated to come in the next reconciliation. So they're short money for our most urgent shortfall. And it's a problem completely of their own making. So it's a serious problem, but it's also a problem Congress ought to get started trying to solve. By throwing a bunch of money towards expanding, not just American industrial production of those key weapons, but enabling allied co-production, the South Koreans, the Japanese, the Germans, the Ukrainians. We ought to be opening up all of the spigots so that we and our allies can solve this problem quickly. Money alone won't be able to solve it fast enough for the United States. We need allied cooperation. Cooperation and co-production to solve it. And Congress can push that forward. Are you worried in the meantime about a crisis in the Taiwan Strait or South Genesee or elsewhere in Asia that might in this window be disruptive in its own right? I worry about those risks, but less because of munitions than just because I think the Trump administration's policies are tempting adversaries to test our willingness to carry out a war. I'm worried about our treaty obligations. On the munitions, even if we run out of preferred munitions, the American military is going to find other ways to fight the war. And so, you know, if we can't do it the way we would like to do it, we will still find ways to fight and win the war. It'll just be messier and costlier because we haven't guarded our munition stockpiles well enough. The failure with allies, just to put this out there, this in concrete terms might be the Chinese kind of testing Filipino opposition, say, in the South Genesee. Of course, President Trump said Taiwan sits right off the coast of a big country and has called into question Article 5. I think what we see with the Russian sabotage campaigns in Europe right now are the results of President Trump calling into question whether the alliance would take a common front. Tom, the call that Corey's making for, defense spending being part of the urgent item on on the to-do list here, intersects with Democratic debates about the future of Democratic foreign policy in complicated ways. I think there's obviously a big push among progressives, but also among some in what you would describe as the centrist camp in the Democratic Party that is pretty skeptical of some of the increases that we've seen under Trump thus far. How do you imagine the Democratic politics of this and Democratic debates playing out in this Congress, but also when it comes to shaping the next Democratic foreign policy? Yeah, I think in Congress, you know, they'll have significant majorities, obviously, so it's not sort of tiny one in the Senate and three or four in the House. So they, you know, the Jeffries will have some more discretion on votes, I think, than he might if it was incredibly tight. This is Hakeem Jeffries, the Speaker of the House or the presumptive Speaker of the House, yeah. Hakeem Jeffries, yeah. But I think there is broad support for sort of the modernization agenda to fix the munitions problem. I don't think there will be a blank check for Trump politically to do that. I think it will come with, you know, conditions, including maybe, you know, aid to Ukraine. There will be other, likely other conditions attached to it, you know, as well, because I think there's a legitimate concern that, well, you know, we're accustomed to thinking about munitions shortfalls as a problem for deterrence. For Trump, and he's been quite open about this, it's about how he will be more aggressive if he had more munitions, you know, and he can't sort of do additional things in Iran because he lacks the ammunition or potentially in Cuba or elsewhere. And so there will be a real concern not to empower him to do things that will be against the national interest. So I think that's where we'll come in. There is, I think, a broader debate on the defense budget, where I think you do have a progressive group or caucus that is calling for deep, budget cuts. I think that is a minority position, certainly in Congress, whether it is in the primary or not. The voters will decide that. But I think in terms of the Hill negotiations, you know, I don't think that would have enough sway, but that does sort of exist. And they believe that there are sufficient cuts that can be made to save a lot of money and it won't have an impact on deterrence and it won't have an impact on modernization. I think I find that hard to believe, but I think that's basically the argument. LESLIE KENDRICK One thing I think we should, should expect from a democratically controlled Congress is a return to the one-for-one, $1 for defense, $1 for domestic spending, which the Trump administration had beaten back and expanded defense spending without expanding domestic spending. I think Democrats are sure to make that a condition of funding going forward. So Medicaid for munitions or something along those lines. I like that. I like that bumper sticker, Dan. All right. Maybe I'll change careers and go into political consulting. The Democratic debates over the last couple of years have one striking feature, one thing that's been a bit surprising to me, and that's what you could call Trump envy. You know, the view that some of what Trump does with leverage, the way he generates leverage, actually holds lessons that future Democratic presidents should, in fact, and Republican presidents for that matter, should, in fact, adopt. What do you think the positive lessons of Trump's foreign policy in this term might be? And where do you see risks in Trump envy leading Democrats? I mean, I think you're right that people have observed this and seen how he breaks with not just tradition and past precedent and with protocol, but often, you know, does things quite erratically that might create some leverage for himself. And I guess people wonder whether or not that could be used for different purposes. I think this was an argument that many people made against his, you know, actions in the first place. I mean, if you just take his basically insisting on equity in private companies, that seems like a risky precedent to set if you have a more, you know, left of center government coming in and a Republican has sort of laid the groundwork for telling visiting CEOs that they should give 10 percent or 20 percent of their company to the U.S. government in exchange for any cooperation. So I think there are things that are out there now that will be part of the debate. I think internationally, the one that, you know, people did focus on was his public sort of breaking with Netanyahu early on in a number of areas, including on negotiating a deal separately with Hamas, basically over the heads of Israel. I think that sort of break and clearly, you know, later on, obviously, there was much more convergence over the decision to go to war in Iran. But there were some breaks there earlier on. I think many people pointed that out as well. My view would be I don't see many sort of positive lessons except to say that obviously we should reconsider like a lot of policies and not sort of accept them just because they've been on the books for a long time. So we should try to sort of think boldly. I think there is a case for using leverage pretty assertively when the stakes are very high and the national interest is genuinely at stake. So I'll give you an example. In the Biden administration, you know, we spent a lot of time negotiating this complicated trilateral agreement with Japan and the Netherlands to impose semiconductor manufacturing equipment controls on China. So ASML is the company in the Netherlands. And, you know, that was imposed initially. But then there was a negotiation where it got very, very complex and was watered down. And there was periods of waiting period, you know, looking at the way Trump has done business. I mean, you could, you know, use economic leverage, link economics and security in that instance and sort of insist on a more robust set of controls. That is one example that people have talked about as a possibility for using leverage a bit more assertively. But clearly, without limits, it has a real downside. And that's where I think you see an active debate on economic statecraft. How do you think about leverage? In a way that there are guardrails for, especially for allies and partners. And there is a framework and it is more sort of limited and controlled, but still more expansive maybe than what we have had before. As we anticipate a meeting between Trump and Xi and Putin when Trump is in China in a few weeks, I think you hear from some parts of democratic debate or, you know, certainly not Trump supporters of the president who see that kind of thing. You know, it'll elicit outrage from large parts of the foreign policy establishment, but you do see people who say, look, we should be more willing to sit down with adversaries in these kinds of configurations, not be afraid of diplomacy. In some ways evokes the debates between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primary about who America should sit down with. Do you think, see anything in Trumpian diplomacy that you will think will have an enduring effect on democratic debates here? That might, I certainly hope not, but it might. I mean, I think my memory of the Obama debate was whether or not the US, I think the US and China were in brink of war when he took office and there was no contact is just factually false, right? And so what we see in their contacts actually is they're a lot less substantive in terms of defending America's interests and pushing a strategic agenda. It's much more, you know, it's a lot less substantive in terms of defending America's and sort of good vibes rather than, you know, actually pushing China on core questions where the two countries will disagree. And on Russia, I mean, that's a longer conversation, but clearly he has not really pushed Putin on Ukraine. So talking about adversary and rivals is a good idea, but accommodating them is not such a good idea. And I think if that trilateral comes off, I think it will highlight the shortcomings, the shortcomings of the diplomatic approach, but it will also highlight something else, which is one of the big developments since, especially since the Ukraine war started, has been the alignment of US adversaries and rivals in really meaningful ways of military integration on a bilateral basis between them. This administration has basically ignored it almost entirely in the official intelligent documents that have been released. They downplay it because it's bilateral, it's not multilateral. You know, senior Pentagon officials have gone to Seoul and not mentioned North Korea. They've gone to Europe and not mentioned Russia. I have a suspicion there's sort of a diktat that they're not allowed to mention any rival that is not Iran. And I mean that seriously. You don't see anybody talking about the potential threat from China, from Russia or from North Korea. And it feels like it's not accidental. And I think a trilateral meeting in China of Putin, Xi and Trump will just underscore that there's an accommodation. And I think there's an accommodation going on of America's rivals and a complete blindness to the gathering threat posed by their cooperation. Meanwhile, there is, you know, a divergence with US allies and a weakening of those alliances. And all of that, I think, is quite dangerous. Corey, we talked earlier about the J.D. Vance statement about the Iran war in the midterms that I think presages some of the debates we'll see among Republicans on foreign policy. I'm interested in how you see that. I think that debate's starting to take shape, what you think will drive it, what the fault lines will be and how the Trump legacy will shape it. that as members both of this administration and others vie to be the next Republican nominee? So I think one of the things we have seen as Republicans have been campaigning for office in this election cycle is the return to fashionability of traditional conservative positions. I mean, Mike Rogers running for the Senate in Michigan disavowed Trump's threats to Canada, disavowed Trump's tariffs, and disavowed the Iran war. And so I think one set of pressures will come from more traditional conservatives arguing that Trump's policies have actually produced an electoral landslide for Democrats, and we need to reconsider the things that made Republicans electable on a policy front. I think the Vance path is a second path, which is to say, we're doing too much in the world, and we should just focus on America's domestic challenges and domestic policies. That'll be another strain in it. But I think there will be a third strain, Walter Russell Mead's Jacksonian Americans, who will argue that short and sharp is the way the United States should fight, and we can be much more autarkic if we take that path. So less frequent engagement, less frequent use of military force. But again, the problem for that is that short and sharp requires your adversary to capitulate to that. And what we have seen in recent wars is adversaries are smart enough to understand they are stronger if they ride it out. This is what Laurie Friedman in our pages, great British military historian, talks about as the short war fallacy that we've been succumbed to repeatedly. Corey, one thing that has been perhaps also surprising in Republican debates, especially since the start of the Iran war, is the way that Israel has become a fault line with large parts of the right really turning against U.S. support for Israel with obviously anti-Semitic undertones and lots of other savory aspects, but also a real policy debate about what the U.S. relationship with Israel should look like. How deep is that fissure? And to what extent do you expect that to be a real fault line in debates about Republican foreign policy going forward? Well, it's not clear to me how deep that will be because, of course, it's going on in both political parties. And I think it's going on for two reasons. One is the choices Israel has made in reaction to the horrific terrorist attacks of October 7th, in particular, Israeli military operations in the West Bank and Gaza. And the second is the American-Israeli partnership in the war on Iran. And I think. Both of those are drawing a lot of anxious reactions across the political spectrum, not just among Republicans, nor was a strident pro-Israel position previously just the political legacy or the political doctrine of Republicans. There was strong Democratic support as well. And I think on both sides of the political aisle, that's really coming under pressure now. Tom, you noted. In your new piece, the, I suppose, fairly obvious point that Gaza and Israel policy will be one of the most fraught parts of Democratic debates going forward. It already has been in Democratic primaries over the last few months. I suppose there are two dimensions of this. One is the debate about what policy should look like going forward. And that, in some ways, seems like the easier one than the debates about personnel and whether people who serve in the Biden administration should be able to serve in Democratic administrations again. How disruptive do you expect this to be? In both primary debates, but also the broader debate about the future of Democratic foreign policy? And what might a kind of new consensus look like to the extent that you think that's possible? Yeah, I think just as a starting point, I would expect in general terms that the start of the primary campaign will be accompanied by a slew of purity tests that different groups will put forward. Do you commit not to hire anyone from the last administration? Or do you commit not to hire anyone from the defense industry? Or the tech industry? And I certainly hope that the candidates basically refuse to answer any of those tests, right? I think there's sort of political gamesmanship in general. And, you know, let's have a meaningful, serious conversation about these things. But I think the sort of raise your hand on the stage questions, I think, will get offered. And I think they serve certain interests, right? People propose them because the answer is likely to be in a way that reflects the interests and preferences that they have. I do think, clearly, Israel and Gaza and the West Bank will be sort of a major issue. And part of that may include going back over decisions that were made, although I don't see any candidate other than the former Vice President Harris, who was sort of directly involved. And I think in her case, she would probably distance herself or say she disagreed with. Parts of, you know, significant parts of that policy, she's basically already said that effectively. So I think it largely will be about the future. I think there's been shifts among centrists and progressives on this. One of the general points I make in the piece is that the debates within each camp are actually as interesting as the debates between them. But in the centrist camp, I think what Rahm Emanuel said in Tel Aviv in July probably is a framework that most people will not agree with. I think it's a framework that most people will not agree with. that most people will not diverge from all that significantly, which is, you know, support for the U.S.-Israel alliance, but an argument that Bibi Netanyahu in particular, but also Israel more generally, some have been pushing for a greater Israel project that has undermined their security and also undermined U.S. interests and a willingness to use more pressure, including sanctions on not just settler violence, but also on illegal settlements and entities that facilitate those and to try to push for a Palestinian state as part of a regional plan. So I think that's been a pretty major shift. I think from where the Biden administration was, you did see some sanctions and individuals in the West Bank for the first time. But this, I think, is different. On the progressive side, I think, you know, they sort of, that would be the minimum starting point. They'd probably start a bit further along than that. And And then I think in putting more sustained pressure on any Israeli government that generally maintains their historic sort of policy, plus then some real debates about whether, you know, you should back a two-state solution at all, or if there needs to be a one-state solution with equal rights, which obviously would potentially cause a lot of instability and conflict. So I think all of those debates will happen, but I think the baseline will be different, even if the center is sort of within that argument. The policy still will be different, I think, from what the policy was in the Biden administration. The other issue, or I suppose a kind of set of issues that jumped out in that piece, is on China, especially as it relates to AI. And AI, I think, will be a complicated and quite prominent political issue, even in domestic terms. How do you see the kind of fault lines in that debate shaping up, both when it comes to the approach to China and competition with China broadly, but also the AI piece of that? Yeah, I think it's interesting when you set aside Israel in the Middle East, where China really doesn't feature that much, a tiny bit maybe, but really not at all. China sort of is a recurring theme throughout almost all of the other issues, right? there's a big debate on China policy itself, but then it's also there in AI. It's also there on climate and energy. It's also there in defense. So it's there on a lot of the issues. It's also there on the global economy and the approach to foreign economic policy and industrial policy. And so that's like a recurring thread. And I think it is quite significant. And basically, You know, the difference is between those who see the world becoming more bipolar effectively and the strategic competition by the administration called managed competition should be one of the organizing principles of U.S. foreign policy and that they're particularly concerned about that. That leads them on AI to be in favor of export controls, to slow down China, to buy the time with the lead to be able to be serious about AI safety and building alliances. they would have a focused dialogue with China on AI safety risk, but not really be that interested in the grand bargain that they would see as unlikely. So that's like one group, that's sort of the centrist group, even though there were debates between centrists on all of those issues. And then the progressives, I think, have a much greater hope for cooperation with China on transnational challenges, including on AI in particular. And they do, I think, have hopes of grand bargain and believe that you can get geopolitical stability much more easily and straightforwardly than centrists like me would maintain, because China's not really an aggressive revisionist power. Sometimes their revisionism is, they would say, generated by our actions, its sort of response to us, and that if we basically show that we're willing to engage that we're exercising restraint that we will be able to easily deter. them from aggressive steps. And then we should basically have, if not a grand bargain, certainly we should make cooperation on the shared challenges being the organizing principle of US policy. And if that means you can't really have export controls, then that's fine. I do think there is an interesting difference between some of the elected officials on this, on the progressive side and the foreign policy experts, particularly in the economic piece, where I think when you look at senators like Warren and Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna in the House, they tend to be quite concerned about China's overcapacity, quite concerned about de-industrialization, and in favor of quite tough measures on China economically. Whereas many of the people arguing for more of a rapprochement with China on the foreign policy sort of expert side, including many of the leading progressives, are basically opposed to that because they don't want economic confrontation with China and they don't want to see a benefit from links, for example, over electric vehicles that could be helpful on climate policy and cutting carbon emissions. And so that was the most striking tension, I think, on the progressive side that jumped out. Can you imagine that those progressive positions resulting in a change to policy towards Taiwan in a progressive democratic administration? I think that's unlikely because I think there's a number of leading progressives or restrainers who I think have really engaged with this issue and worry that sort of unilateral changes could actually, you know, make conflict more likely. And I think that's encouraging. And so, you know, Taiwan is obviously a difficult issue for candidates to talk about it because it's, the formulation is so complicated and hard for all of us to remember sometimes, you know, to repeat it completely accurately. But I think the thing they can just say is, look, you know, that they're in favor of this issue. The status quo, they oppose a change to the status quo from anywhere, from the U.S., from Taiwan or from China. And as regards the use of force option, they refuse to answer because they're not going to tell anyone what they think. And I think that's something Trump said is pretty simple. And I think it is sort of sufficient. And I think they just, I don't think they really want to talk about Taiwan all that much. And so I think, and I don't think they're particularly curious about new innovations in the hopes of securing cooperation that could end up, you know, in the end, you know, in the end, backfiring. And I think that's a positive, that there's some risk aversion of that, I think, is a positive thing. Corey, let me close by allowing you or encouraging you to give full vent to your optimism. I think of you as a relatively optimistic person. As you watch GOP debates about foreign policy after Trump, what do you think is a plausible outcome that would be a good one from your perspective? If you kind of imagine an optimistic scenario here, what does that look like? So what I noticed in the polling that the Chicago Council on Global Affairs does on foreign issues, what I noticed in the run-up to the 2016 election and its aftermath was that when the argument was about principles, about are allies a burden, are, is trade exporting American jobs, are immigrants taking American jobs? In the abstract, people were supportive of those positions. But then when they saw the policies, support dropped, substantially. And so I think one of the things those of us who are experts in foreign and defense policy have done is talk too much about principles and not enough about practicalities. Because I think on the practicalities, one of the things the election showed us is that there was a backlash against Trump administration policies, even if people supported the principles. And I think that's likely to play out a lot in the future. I think that's likely to play out a lot in the future. I think that's likely to play out a lot in future conservative debates, that people may not want to uphold a liberal international order because it seems so abstract. But when you say, do you want China to get to set the rules for the global economy? The answer to that will be no. Or do you think the people of Taiwan deserve self-determination? And should we be a power that helps uphold that? The more concrete we are, the more likely we are to carry a broad swath of Republicans back towards traditional conservative policies. And I think what I meant by those becoming fashionable again is that I think conservatives have no better answer than our traditional responses on defending human dignity, expanding economic opportunity, and making the world a freer and safer place. And I think the pendulum's going to return to those. In conservative circles. That is a good note to end on. Thanks so much to both of you for doing this today. I hope you will be part of these debates and both shedding light on them and driving them in our pages going forward. But for now, thanks so much for doing this today. Thanks, Dan. It was great to be with you. Thank you. 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 Adrian Feinberg, Adelaide Parker, Ben Metzner, and Kanishk Tharoor, with audio engineering by Todd Yeager, and original music 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. 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