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.

In June, Narendra Modi was sworn in for a third consecutive term as India’s prime minister. But—in a surprise outcome—his party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, failed to win a parliamentary majority. Now, for the first time, Modi sits atop a coalition government—and India’s path forward appears far less certain, and far more interesting, than seemed plausible not long ago.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta is one of India’s wisest political observers—a great political theorist and writer as well as a fierce critic, and occasional target, of Modi and his policies. Foreign Affairs Senior Editor Kanishk Tharoor spoke with him on September 3 about what the election means for Indian democracy and where the country goes from here.

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