2026-09-17
1 小时 0 分钟I'm Dan Kurtz-Falen, and this is the Foreign Affairs Interview.
My own view, maybe this is just a function of getting older,
is that I'm less impressed with what you can do with military power.
It just, the trouble with violence is it seems like it's definitive.
It just sorts stuff out, and it rarely does.
By some measures, there is more war in the world today than at any point since World War II.
Today's wars have brought a level of destruction, disruption,
and global risk that would have seemed hard to imagine not long ago,
often in places where such combat seemed a thing of the past.
Policymakers once again worry about nuclear use,
and military planners once again contemplate war between great powers, including the U.S.
And China and NATO and Russia.
And all of this comes as the Trump administration dismantles key pieces of the international system
and technology scrambles expectations about how wars start, unfold, and end.
No one has left a greater mark on our understanding of wars past and present than Lawrence Friedman.
Friedman has written a slew of definitive books on military strategy and history,
and he has offered some of the most penetrating analysis of Iran, Ukraine,
and more in the pages of Foreign Affairs and elsewhere.
I spoke with Friedman on Monday, September 14th about the course of today's conflicts,
about what is and is not changing in the nature of war,