Council on Foreign Relations

Alyssa Ayres didn’t start out focused on foreign policy, but planned to major in engineering when a semester abroad in India led her to begin questioning the pathway she was on. This led to experiences in the nonprofit, government, and private sectors, including at CFR, where she is an adjunct senior fellow for India, Pakistan, and South Asia. She is also the dean of the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University—the first woman to serve in the position. Read more about how Ayres transitioned between various sectors, her views on the value of interdisciplinary expertise, and her experience visiting an elephant sanctuary in Malaysia: https://on.cfr.org/498QSCH

America’s global role is more contested and uncertain than at any time since World War II, and the time is ripe for a fundamental reevaluation of the nation’s strategy. To meet this moment, the Council on Foreign Relations is launching the Future of American Strategy Initiative, a multiyear effort that aims to answer one defining question: Where does America go from here? To kickstart this conversation, CFR scholars, across 27 essays, explore the evolving strategic environment the United States will face over the next decade, spanning American strategy, great power rivalry, global order, geoeconomics, and warfare.

The summit in Beijing between President Trump and President Xi "turned out to be—from the perspective of Southeast Asia and South Asia, at least— not totally disastrous," writes expert Josh Kurlantzick. "That the summit happened at all mattered. After nearly a year of canceled and delayed leader-to-leader contact, the fact that Trump and Xi actually sat across from each other in Beijing was itself a signal that the world’s most consequential bilateral relationship had not completely come off the rails, which is critical to Southeast Asian states." "That said, most Southeast Asian and South Asian states were fairly to extremely disappointed with the results," Kurlantzick writes. "Just the fact that no real progress was made toward ending the Iran war has seriously angered Southeast Asian leaders and consumers, already amidst their worst energy crisis in decades." "Southeast Asian and South Asian states are preparing for an even longer conflict—one that could cause a second, even bigger energy shock, with far higher inflation and greater damage to populations." "Then there was the fact that the two giants made no substantial progress on issues related to AI or China’s export controls on rare earths," writes Kurlantzick. "Without any agreements, Southeast Asian states remain stuck between competing U.S. and Chinese technology platforms reliant on AI, making it nearly impossible for regional companies to make long-term plans about which AI platforms to use and how to use them."

"The Beijing summit between President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping produced something rarer than a breakthrough: a mutually useful ambiguity," writes expert Zongyuan Zoe Liu, PhD, CFA. "China’s readout did not reject the White House’s language of 'strategic stability,' but rather claimed and elaborated on it. Both sides used the phrase 'a constructive relationship of strategic stability,' but Beijing gave it a more expansive political content. In Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s telling, stability meant not only keeping communication open or reducing risk, but also keeping competition within 'proper limits,' managing differences, respecting China’s 'core interests,' recognizing each side’s development path, and grounding the relationship in the three U.S.-China joint communiqués," she writes. "That difference matters. For Washington, the summit was about making competition manageable enough to deliver economic and political dividends. For Beijing, it was about changing the vocabulary of the relationship. The United States emphasized transactions; China emphasized hierarchy, status, and rules of conduct."

"China’s true holdings of U.S. bonds cannot be assessed by just looking at the 'China' line in the U.S. Treasury's International Capital data. Both the Treasury and the Agency portfolios need to be adjusted for the bonds that China keeps on custody in Canada and in Europe," writes expert Brad Setser. Read his analysis on China’s true holdings of U.S. bonds:

“In a world of spheres of influence—whether brought about by erratic U.S. foreign policy, Chinese opportunism, or some combination of the two—Washington has the most to lose,” write CFR expert Rebecca Lissner and Mira Rapp-Hooper for Foreign Affairs.

An estimated investment gap of $100 to $200 billion is inhibiting clean energy deployment, writes expert David M. Hart in a new report. This 'missing middle' funding gap slows the movement of promising technologies from the pilot or testing stage to the market, keeping promising innovations in the lab when they could be making the energy industry more secure, affordable, reliable, and sustainable. Hart and other experts explain how markets for the technologies of the future could be built.

South Africa's elite is paying the price for championing dubious ideologies at the expense of basic economics, Ebenezer Obadare argues. "When the economic rubber hits the road, you cannot eat identity. The earlier the South African leadership internalizes this lesson and stops doubling down on regressive identitarian ideas, the better for it and the continent at large."

Artificial intelligence diffusion is stress-testing the assumptions that underpin U.S. cybersecurity, writes expert Vinh Nguyen. "The United States holds real advantages—in model capability, in allied coordination, in the depth of its defender community—every one resting on assumptions that were reasonable when made and unexamined since. The instinct will be to treat that examination as overhead: one more review standing between leadership and the real work of deployment. But inspecting the foundation is the precondition for scaling AI with confidence."