In just a few short years, the United States’ China policy has undergone nothing short of a revolution. Few people have been more central to that shift than Matt Pottinger. He was a reporter in China for Reuters and The Wall Street Journal, then a U.S. Marine, deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan. He went on to become the top policymaker on Asia and the deputy national security adviser in the Trump administration.

Pottinger argues in a new essay for Foreign Affairs that even though Washington’s China strategy has already gotten much tougher, it still has a ways to go—to take on more risk and lay out a clear, if radical, goal for the kind of China the United States wants to see. His views are a window into what China policy might look like if Donald Trump returns to the White House.

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

The stakes of a second Trump term are very clear to Ben Rhodes, who served for eight years as one of Barack Obama’s closest advisers on national security. “Trump’s blend of strongman nationalism and isolationism could create a permission structure for aggression,” Rhodes writes in a new piece for Foreign Affairs.

Today, Rhodes is a co-host of the podcast Pod Save the World and the author of After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made. From 2009 to 2017, he served as U.S. deputy national security adviser for strategic communications and speechwriting in the Obama administration.

Rhodes is as clear-eyed about the achievements and failures of President Joe Biden’s foreign policy. If Biden does win a second term, Rhodes argues, he should set out a new strategy—one that takes the world as it is, not as Washington wishes it would be.

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

Earlier this month, Claudia Sheinbaum won a sweeping victory in Mexico’s presidential election. Although a lot of the coverage framed the results as a win for women and progressive politics, the story is far more complicated.

Mexico’s democracy is in trouble, warns Denise Dresser, a political analyst in Mexico. For years, Dresser has watched Sheinbaum’s party—and its previous leader, Andrés Manuel López Obrador—govern through polarization and the erosion of democratic institutions, even as the country struggles with violence, corruption, and persistent inequality. Dresser is a professor of political science at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico.

There is a chance Sheinbaum charts a different course. But if not, Dresser worries that Mexico could face an autocratic future.

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