Foreign Affairs

To catch up to China, America and its allies must dig.

How far will he go to make peace—and war?

Which debates matter most for 2028.

A useful tool has been unjustly maligned.

The United States and China are locked in a global competition to determine who will dominate artificial intelligence and whether it will be democracies or autocracies that set the standards and values of the new digital age. The United States leads the world in the sophistication and power of its artificial intelligence models, and its innovation base and investment in research and development remain unparalleled.But AI competition is much broader than modeling alone. It encompasses a technology ecosystem that includes power generation, servers, and deployment in real-world applications. Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, has described the AI industry as a five-layer cake with energy at its base and chips, infrastructure, models, and applications above it. To win the AI race with China, the United States needs to maintain or establish an advantage in each of these layers. And to do that, the United States needs Taiwan.

China’s Food Insecurity Could Prevent a War Over Taiwan

The case for an economic security alliance.

A new way to deter Russia.

How long will elites stay loyal to Kim Jong Un?

The folly of a hawkish restoration.

The Arab monarchies must help Washington and Tehran save face.

Why Iran and the Houthis keep winning the waterways.

How military partnerships make Washington vulnerable to its adversaries.

Why Bibi’s national security vision will endure.

Trump could salvage the Kremlin’s objectives in Ukraine.

Tatiana Mitrova, a fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy and former energy scholar at Moscow’s Russian Academy of Sciences, and Sergey Vakulenko, an oil and gas expert at Carnegie’s Russia Eurasia Center, argue that Russia and Ukraine are locked in an energy war that has become an adaptation spiral, despite growing human and economic costs and despite current US pressure on Ukraine. They observe Ukraine’s remarkable ability to withstand Russian strikes, while questioning claims that long-range Ukrainian strikes will be able to achieve game-changing damage on Russia. Ukraine and Russia have transformed the role of energy warfare in modern conflict, drawing on low costs drones but also new forms of technological resilience that are likely to make wars longer and more dangerous.

The constraints and costs of the new security consensus.

Monica de Bolle, an expert in Brazilian economic policy, makes an authoritative argument that Brazil’s economic problems will persist no matter the outcome of the country’s presidential election. A Flávio Bolsonaro administration would fare no better than Lula when it comes to reducing debt and delivering growth—and Bolsonaro’s illiberal policies could make the economic picture even worse.

Barry Posen, a professor at MIT, is one of America's leading experts on international security. He argues that the United States military is breaking down because it has been overused and overextended over the last 30 years, and that the only way to repair it is for Washington to exercise much more restraint.

Dmitry Adamsky, an expert on Russian security and Russian nuclear deterrence strategy at Harvard and Reichman Universities, examines a large-scale shift in Russia’s strategic thinking over the past year, centered around the view that Europe, rather than the United States, is now Russia’s primary geopolitical rival and adversary, and looking at the consequences of this shift for US efforts to end the war in Ukraine.