A year has passed since Hamas’s October 7 assault on Israel sparked a brutal war in Gaza—one that is now spreading north into Lebanon and threatening to reel in bigger powers, including the United States.

But the war has always been bigger than Israel and Hamas, writes Ari Shavit in a new essay for Foreign Affairs. In his view, and the view of many Israelis, the main threat—not only to Israel but also to the free world—is Iran, backed by Russia and China.

Shavit, a leading Israeli writer, has spent decades trying to make sense of Israel's identity, democracy, and role in the Middle East. He is the author of My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel and Existential War: From Disaster to Victory to Resurrection. Foreign Affairs Editor Daniel Kurtz-Phelan spoke with him on October 4 about how Israelis are thinking about the conflict as it enters its second year—and what it will take to bring about peace.

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

The world Americans face today is more complicated—and dangerous—than it has been for decades. Yet there is a growing, and in many ways understandable, desire to turn inward—a sense that there is little U.S. foreign policy can do to solve problems abroad and lots it can do to make them worse.

Condoleezza Rice, director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, argues against this impulse in a new essay in Foreign Affairs. Great powers, she writes, don’t get to just mind their own business.

Rice served as national security adviser and secretary of state in the George W. Bush administration. Much of what she grappled with then—Russia’s invasion of a neighbor, military collisions with China, the last major clash between Israel and Hezbollah—has worrying echoes now, especially as conflict in the Middle East threatens to spiral into a wider war.

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

The United States is grappling with two of the biggest challenges it has ever faced: the rise of China and the threat of catastrophic climate change.

At home, the Biden administration has forged a green industrial policy that could transform the U.S. economy. But as China threatens to dominate the global market for clean energy, it is not enough to invest domestically, Brian Deese argues in a new Foreign Affairs essay.

Deese has been at the center of climate and economic policymaking for over a decade. He served as the director of the National Economic Council in the Biden administration, where he was one of the key architects behind the Inflation Reduction Act. During the Obama years, he helped lead the auto bailout and negotiate the Paris agreement on climate change.

Now, he has a plan for the United States to lead the global energy transition on its own terms.

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