Camden Conference in the World ~ September 2025

Pictured, clockwise from top: Nirupama Rao, Pratap Banhu Mehta, Fyodor Lukyanov, Paul Solman, Thomas Nilsen, John Herbst

A month that saw Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi holding hands with his Chinese and Russian counterparts while his government exchanged insults with officials in Washington also saw former Indian Foreign Secretary and 2024 Camden keynoter Nirupama Rao directly address the issue of US-Indian relations in an interview with Foreign Affairs, in which she debates with Ashley Tellis, a strong defender of current US policy on India. In addition, Rao published a poetic but pointed critique of “My India, My Love.” She asks why India “can send a rocket to the moon on a fraction of NASA’s budget” but can’t “keep a railway station clean.” Or provide adequate health care or libraries for its children. And she asks why so many Indians forget that “to honor the Constitution is not to cheer a leader. It is to honor a republic that makes leaders servants, not masters.”

Another 2024 speaker in Camden, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, joined Rao in emphasizing the need for India to uphold “constitutional values” and lamented the erosion of the country’s “civilizational sensibility” in a high-profile lecture in Delhi on his “Vision of India: 2047.” The date refers to what will be the 100^th anniversary of Indian independence. Mehta last month also questioned whether “Indian capital” will prove capable of rising to the challenge presented by “the new imperialism taking shape in the emerging world order.”

Editor of Russia in Global Affairs and prominent Russian foreign policy commentator Fyodor Lukyanov in the immediate aftermath of the Alaska summit between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin drew comparisons to the 1986 Geneva summit between Ronald Raegan and Mikhail Gorbachev. The 1986 summit ended with no agreement but with ideas floated that “were radical and far-reaching, ” Lukyanov, a speaker at Camden’s 2015 Russia conference, wrote for state media outlet Russia Today. “If the process launched in Alaska continues in the same spirit, we could see an outcome that’s the reverse of what followed Geneva. Back then, Reagan pushed to end the Cold War on Washington’s terms – and succeeded. Today, what’s on the table is the end of the post-Cold War era, a time defined by unchallenged US global dominance.”

John Herbst, a US Ambassador to Ukraine under former President George W. Bush and a 2022 Camden Conference speaker, couldn’t agree less. He advised Trump to announce his intention to send Ukraine “Tomahawk missiles (with a range of over 1,000 miles) if Russian bombardment of Ukrainian cities and civilians does not end in…ten days.” Other steps aimed at getting Putin “to negotiate a durable peace” that Herbst proposed in an article in the Atlantic Council publication New Atlanticist include joint production with Ukraine of “advanced drones” and announcement that any Russian missiles or drones overflying Nato airspace on their way to Ukraine “will be treated as a hostile object and dealt with accordingly.”

Thomas Nilsen, a speaker at Camden’s 2021 Arctic conference, in late August described a show of force and training exercise by a multinational Nato naval group including two US vessels off the northern tip of Norway. Writing in The Barents Observer news site that he edits, Nilsen links the exercise to possible Russian ambitions to use these waters for its nuclear-armed submarine fleet in case of an “escalating conflict” with Nato.

PBS economics correspondent and 2023 Camden speaker Paul Solman looked at what the billions of dollars being pumped into Artificial Intelligence (AI) is doing to the US economy and whether it’s creating a stock market bubble. “A.I. can take away the drudgery of the work and allow the human to provide the things that only a person can do, creativity, innovation, coalition-building,” a senior A.I. executive at Microsoft tells Solman. Before we get there, most of the companies investing those billions will go bust, suggests a professor at NYU. But so what, he tells his class. ”Every advance in humankind has come from overreaching.” And so what that even lots of Stanford computer science grads are now having trouble finding jobs due to A.I. Solman’s closing thought: “The lord giveth and the lord taketh away.”