The breakneck pace of AI progress and the intensity of the competition for AI supremacy has left U.S. policymakers in a difficult position. They must encourage the innovation needed to ensure an advantage over China and to power economic growth; protect against a national security catastrophe; and assuage the concerns of an anxious and skeptical public.

Sebastian Mallaby calls this the “AI trilemma” in his most recent essay for Foreign Affairs. And he argues that it requires more than the piecemeal measures currently on offer in Washington—or, for that matter, in Beijing or Brussels. Mallaby is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the host of a new podcast called The Spillover, as well as the author of The Infinity Machine, an excellent new book about the founding of the AI lab DeepMind.

Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke with him on June 24 about the state of AI competition, about the stakes of that competition, and about how its course will reshape societies, economies, and global politics.

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

Like the rest of us, China’s leaders are confronting a world in turmoil. They see uncertain American commitments to allies, even as many of those allies ramp up their own defense efforts. They see changing relationships, whether deepening ties between Russia and North Korea or new connections among anxious middle powers. They see American military action in the Middle East and Western Hemisphere, with effects on American power in China’s own region.

And yet, as Oriana Skylar Mastro sees it, far from surprising Beijing, such disruptions are being taken as confirmation of what Chinese leader Xi Jinping often refers to as “great change unseen in a century.” Mastro has written a series of essays for Foreign Affairs on how Beijing aims to shape and exploit that change. She joined Dan Kurtz-Phelan to discuss China’s strategy for navigating this turmoil—and what the United States should, and should not, do in response.

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

The war in Iran pitted two of the world’s mightiest militaries against one weakened by years of strikes, sanctions, and sabotage. And yet it was the smaller country that appears to have emerged with the advantage. In Ukraine, similarly, Russia expected an easy victory, only to be repeatedly thwarted by apparently outmatched Ukrainian forces. These outcomes may seem surprising. But Paul Scharre argues that they should not be. The innovations that have in recent years transformed battlefields have also leveled the playing field between powers great and small. And as Scharre wrote in a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, the U.S. military is unprepared for a new age of warfare in which drones, AI, and other emerging technologies undercut the dominance it has become used to.

Scharre, the executive vice president of the Center for a New American Security, served as an Army Ranger in Iraq and Afghanistan and then went on to craft Pentagon policy on drones and autonomous weapons systems. Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke with him about what the wars in Iran and Ukraine should tell us about the future of warfare more generally, about what China is learning from those wars, and about what the United States must do to adapt.

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