Donald Trump just finished his first tour of the Middle East since returning to the White House. The region has changed a lot since he was last there as president. There’s been Hamas’s attack on Israel, the ensuing Israeli retaliation, the weakening of Iran and its proxies, and the fall of the Assad regime in Syria. Trump used the visit to announce flashy deals with Gulf leaders and to commit to lifting sanctions on Syria. But with big questions remaining about Gaza and about nuclear negotiations with Iran, the future of the region and the U.S. role in it remain unsettled.

In a recent essay for Foreign Affairs, Dana Stroul argues that a new regional order could emerge from the recent upheaval—but only if Washington takes the lead in what will undoubtedly be an intricate political process. Stroul is director of research and the Shelly and Michael Kassen senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. During the Biden administration, she served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, witnessing firsthand how quickly new regional power dynamics can take shape—and how quickly they can unravel.

Stroul spoke with Dan Kurtz-Phelan on May 20 to discuss the prospect of a new Iranian nuclear deal, the future of Israeli policy in Gaza, and what Trump’s recent moves herald for the new Middle East.

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

In a little more than 100 days, Donald Trump has set about dismantling much of the international order that has prevailed since World War II. That’s true of traditional U.S. approaches to trade, to conflict, alliances, international organizations, and more.

But as much as we focus on Trump, Michael Beckley argues that much of this change in U.S. foreign policy has deeper roots, going to the very nature of American power. The United States is increasingly a “rogue superpower,” Beckley has written, “neither internationalist nor isolationist but aggressive, powerful, and increasingly out for itself.” How this America interacts, not just with adversaries like China but also with allies and others, may be the most important question in geopolitics today.

Beckley is an associate professor of political science at Tufts University, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and Asia director at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and has been one of the sharpest analysts of American grand strategy in an era of deepening great-power competition.

Beckley joined Dan Kurtz-Phelan on May 13 to discuss both the resilience of American power and the risks to it—and what the global transformation now underway will mean for U.S. interests going forward.

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

Donald Trump’s first National Security Strategy, released at the end of 2017, announced the start of a new era for American foreign policy—one that put great-power competition at its center and focused especially on intensifying rivalry with China. For all the dissension and turbulence in American politics since then, that framework for American foreign policy has proved remarkably durable.

Nadia Schadlow is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and served as deputy national security adviser in the first Trump administration. She was the primary author of Trump’s first National Security Strategy and helped crystallize the return of great-power competition as the organizing principle of U.S. strategy. But what great-power competition means for America’s greatest challenges today—and whether it still accurately describes Donald Trump’s view of the world—is an entirely different question.

Schadlow joined Dan Kurtz-Phelan to talk about Trump’s second-term approach—in Ukraine, in Asia, with global trade, and more—and laid out a vision of what a successful Trump foreign policy might look like.

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