Hi, I'm Ravi Agrawal, Foreign Policy's editor-in-chief.

This is FP Live.

Welcome to the show.

We're debuting a special series today.

It's called America Votes What It Means for the World.

Every day this week, we're going to drop a new episode exploring how the two presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, agree or disagree, on policy towards a particular region.

And today, we're starting off with a part of the world that is in turmoil, the Middle East.

I'll remind our viewers that for years now, U.S. foreign policy leaders have looked to lessen

their focus on the Middle East and instead look further east, the idea of the pivot to Asia, an idea that was announced by

President Obama in November 2011, was in fact previewed a month earlier by then Secretary of State

Hillary Clinton in an essay in foreign policy. And yet, the Middle East keeps pulling the United

States back in. The current Secretary of State

Anthony Blinken has made 11 trips to the region since October 7 last year, and we all know why,

as Iran and Israel remain perilously close to all-out war. In the coming days, we will explore

what we know about Trump and Harris's

prospective foreign policies and how they might impact Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

Today, we'll start with the Middle East. I have two excellent guests with me. Stephen Cook

is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author

of most recently The End of Ambition. He's also a columnist at FP and Sanam Vakil is the director

of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House. Like Stephen, she's been on this

program before. Remember, we've still got our special discount going.

Go to foreign policy.com slash subscribe, type in the code FP100 at checkout,

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