Two National Security Advisors on Two Breakneck Months of U.S. Foreign Policy

H.R. McMaster and Jake Sullivan, the respective national security advisors of the first Trump administration and the Biden administration, join Colin Kahl to sort through everything that has happened in U.S foreign policy since the start of the year, from Venezuela and Iran to Greenland and strain on U.S.-European alliances, and the ever-present competition with China and Russia, and how all of these issues may affect the rest of 2026.

H.R. McMaster is the Fouad and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University and lecturer at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. He is a retired United States Army lieutenant general who served as the 25th United States National Security Advisor from 2017 to 2018, and was appointed as the Bernard and Susan Liautaud Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute from 2018 to 2019. His podcast, Today's Battlegrounds, can be found on all major platforms.

Jake Sullivan served as the National Security Advisor for all four years of the Biden administration. He is now the Kissinger Professor of the Practice of Statecraft and World Order at the Harvard Kennedy School and a Senior Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire, and he hosts the podcast The Long Game alongside Jon Finer.

This episode's reading recommendations are "What Is Claude?" by Gideon Lewis-Kraus for The New Yorker, and "The Weakness of the Strongmen," by Stephen Kotkin in Foreign Affairs.

If you like what you hear, you can get additional content from scholars at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies by following us on X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube, and by subscribing to our newsletters and updates.