I spoke with Ashford on the latest episode of FP Live. Ashford is an FP columnist and senior fellow at the Stimson Center. Subscribers can watch the full interview on the video box atop this page or follow the FP Live podcast. What follows here is a lightly edited and condensed transcript.

According to Emma Ashford, the answer is yes—even if we can’t be sure what comes next. In her new book, First Among Equals: U.S. Foreign Policy in a Multipolar World, Ashford makes the case for what she calls “realist internationalism,” a decidedly less ambitious and more nationalist foreign policy tailored for a world in which the United States is still the biggest player, but no longer an overly dominant one.

According to Emma Ashford, the answer is yes—even if we can’t be sure what comes next. In her new book, First Among Equals: U.S. Foreign Policy in a Multipolar World, Ashford makes the case for what she calls “realist internationalism,” a decidedly less ambitious and more nationalist foreign policy tailored for a world in which the United States is still the biggest player, but no longer an overly dominant one.

I spoke with Ashford on the latest episode of FP Live. Ashford is an FP columnist and senior fellow at the Stimson Center. Subscribers can watch the full interview on the video box atop this page or follow the FP Live podcast. What follows here is a lightly edited and condensed transcript.

Ravi Agrawal: You declare on page one, “The old world is dead.” What does that mean?

Emma Ashford: That insight is from Antonio Gramsci, an Italian communist in the 1930s best known for developing the word “hegemony.” He wrote a book in prison about the ways in which the old world was dead, and how the new hadn’t yet been born. He meant that everybody accepted that the political structures, the institutions that had characterized politics in Italy and in Europe up to that point, weren’t working anymore. But their replacements hadn’t yet emerged. Elites were casting around for something; inertia was carrying people forward, but there wasn’t yet a new order. That is what is happening in international politics today. We have moved past this unipolar period of unchallenged U.S. dominance. We’re heading for something new, but we’re still in the transition phase of figuring out what that new world looks like.

RA: When you describe [Donald] Trump as the first post-unipolar president, what does that mean? Do you think he knows that?

EA: Some of it is actually about his intentions, or the way he expresses U.S. interests. If we’re going to talk about data and trends, then you can argue that the unipolar moment ends at the financial crisis in 2008, all the way to the war in Ukraine or beyond. But if we are talking instead about U.S.