How the Past Shadows China’s Future: A Conversation With Odd Arne Westad

The Foreign Affairs Interview · Jan 1, 2026 · 59m

The biggest questions in U.S. foreign policy today tend to be about China. Policymakers and analysts argue over the implications of China’s rise, the extent of its ambitions, the nature of its economic influence, and the meaning of its growing military strength. Underlying these arguments is a widespread sense that where Beijing once seemed likely to slot comfortably into a U.S.-led international order, it now poses a profound challenge to American interests.

No one brings more perspective to these arguments than the historian Odd Arne Westad. In a series of essays in Foreign Affairs over the…