Building a Life-Giving Economy – Foreign Policy

There’s a rare bipartisan consensus in Washington that China’s rise must be countered in the strongest way possible. Democrats and Republicans seemingly compete over who can be tougher o…Show moren Beijing.
The problem with the tone of the current debate, according to Cornell University professor and former State Department advisor Jessica Chen Weiss, is that policymakers are locked in an escalatory spiral. Anyone who seeks to diverge from the consensus is accused of having sympathy for the other side.

Weiss, a China specialist, worked on the State Department’s policy planning staff in 2021 and 2022. Since then, she has widely published her concerns, been cited in Foreign Policy articles, and been the subject of a New Yorker profile. Are her warnings valid? Is she accurately assessing the nature of China’s challenge? And if she is, how should policymakers adapt?

Watch FP’s Ravi Agrawal frank discussion with Weiss or read a condensed transcript of the interview. 
 
 

The Biden administration has passed landmark legislations such as the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the CHIPS and Science Act, which provide subsidies in clean energy and semiconducto…Show morers worth well over $400 billion. But the inducements encourage U.S. companies to invest only at home—not elsewhere. Opportunistic firms in Asia and Europe have already begun to relocate investments to the United States.
Cue the protests from other parts of the globe: A chorus of nations are accusing Washington of fostering unfair competition.
But it’s not just the United States. The world over, countries are embarking on ambitious projects of industrial policy. What does that mean for trade and globalization?
FP’s Ravi Agrawal sat down with U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai, the Biden administration’s top official tasked with mapping out and implementing the White House’s trade policy. Watch the conversation on FP Live, the magazine’s forum for live journalism, or read a condensed transcript.

This week marks exactly one year since Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his troops to invade Ukraine. There is now little doubt that Putin failed in his initial goals: Kyiv is still …Show morestanding, Ukrainians are determined to keep fighting, and the West has so far stayed resolute in its support of Ukraine. If Putin had hoped to weaken NATO, the very opposite has happened, with Finland and Sweden on the cusp of joining the transatlantic military alliance.
But beyond the goals of one leader in Moscow, it is also clear that Ukraine has suffered horrors of a historic nature. By one estimate from Harvard University, more than 130,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed or severely wounded, in addition to the deaths of more than 7,000 Ukrainian civilians. Ukraine’s economy and infrastructure have been dealt blows that will take decades to recover from.
What will another year of war look like? What can we glean from the current state of play on the battlefield? FP’s Ravi Agrawal spoke with two of the very best Russia experts: Angela Stent, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and With the Rest, and Michael Kofman, the research program director of the Russia studies program at the Center for Naval Analyses. Watch the conversation or read the condensed transcript.