Foreign Affairs November/December 2023: The new issue features new essays by today’s leading policymakers and thinkers, including U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan on the future of American foreign policy, former U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michèle Flournoy on how artificial intelligence will transform the military, and scholars Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman on the convergence of economic and national security.

The Sources of American Power

A Foreign Policy for a Changed World

By Jake Sullivan

Nothing in world politics is inevitable. The underlying elements of national power, such as demography, geography, and natural resources, matter, but history shows that these are not enough to determine which countries will shape the future. It is the strategic decisions countries make that matter most—how they organize themselves internally, what they invest in, whom they choose to align with and who wants to align with them, which wars they fight, which they deter, and which they avoid.

The Dysfunctional Superpower

Can a Divided America Deter China and Russia?

By Robert M. Gates

The United States now confronts graver threats to its security than it has in decades, perhaps ever. Never before has it faced four allied antagonists at the same time—Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran—whose collective nuclear arsenal could within a few years be nearly double the size of its own. Not since the Korean War has the United States had to contend with powerful military rivals in both Europe and Asia. And no one alive can remember a time when an adversary had as much economic, scientific, technological, and military power as China does today.

Five people on a gondola drifting through New York's subway.

The New Yorker – October 16, 2023 issue: The new issue‘s cover features Yonatan Popper’s “Service Changes” – the delightful and dreadful parts of riding the subway.

Jake Sullivan’s Trial by Combat

A photoillustration of Jake Sullivan with a map of Ukraine.

Inside the White House’s battle to keep Ukraine in the fight.

By Susan B. Glasser

On a Monday afternoon in August, when President Joe Biden was on vacation and the West Wing felt like a ghost town, his national-security adviser, Jake Sullivan, sat down to discuss America’s involvement in the war in Ukraine. Sullivan had agreed to an interview “with trepidation,” as he had told me, but now, in the White House’s Roosevelt Room, steps from the Oval Office, he seemed surprisingly relaxed for a congenital worrier. (“It’s my job to worry,” he once told an interviewer. “So I worry about literally everything.”)

The Crimes Behind the Seafood You Eat

China has invested heavily in an armada of far-flung fishing vessels, in part to extend its global influence. This maritime expansion has come at grave human cost.

By Ian Urbina

In the past few decades, partly in an effort to project its influence abroad, China has dramatically expanded its distant-water fishing fleet. Chinese firms now own or operate terminals in ninety-five foreign ports. China estimates that it has twenty-seven hundred distant-water fishing ships, though this figure does not include vessels in contested waters; public records and satellite imaging suggest that the fleet may be closer to sixty-five hundred ships.