Camden Conference in the World ~ April 2025

President Donald Trump’s purposefully disruptive foreign and economic policy moves have – not surprisingly — been a favored topic of comment by former Camden speakers over the weeks since our February Conference. Mark Blythe, Brown University international economics professor and speaker at Camden’s 2022 Europe conference, talked to Kai Ryssdal – a colleague on NPR’s “Marketplace” of our favorite moderator David Brancaccio – about the impacts of the “once-in-a-generation shift” Trump is bringing about “in how we run the global economy.” The president and his advisors have made clear they do not intend to use government spending to bail out the economy if a recession occurs, as they concede it may, Blythe notes. “The world can be divided into people who think the economy can get into trouble, and if the state doesn’t step in to stop it, it’s one way traffic all the way down,” he adds. “And then there’s people who think, no, absolutely not. Let’s break things. And then when we do, there’ll be a huge amount of growth afterwards. We’re making a bet… that that’s going to be what’s happening.”

Simon Evenett, 2023 Global Trade speaker in Camden and professor of international trade at the IMD business school in Switzerland, sees the economic disruption playing out under Trump from a slightly different angle than Blythe. “What we see in Washington at the moment is a clear overestimation of the US’ leverage in the world trading system,” he told Turkish news site Anadolu. The US risks losing “standing as a credible, open, and reliable trading partner,” and with it, its “leverage over other countries.” Evenett is doubtful that tariffs will translate into a lot of investment in the US by foreign companies, noting that few factories actually got built as a result of tariffs imposed by Trump in his first term or of President Joe Biden’s attempt to use carrots to attract investment under the Inflation Reduction Act. Corporate promises to invest are “excellent public relations tools” but “not to be believed without further verification.”

Speaker at the recent 2025 Camden Conference and professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies Hal Brands wrote in a Bloomberg column soon after Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance’s altercation with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the White House that there was “a larger and not-incoherent bid to rework global alignments and remake US policy” behind this “sad spectacle in US diplomacy.” The strategy involves “shock therapy” to force Europe to take responsibility for its own defense, a “de-risked relationship” with Russia that will allow the US to focus on China, and “demoralizing” US policy. But it’s a strategy “riddled with problems and perils,” Brand suggested. Brand’s brand of US foreign policy analysis also got high billing in this New York Times overview of new books on US relations with Russia.

Trump hasn’t been the only topic addressed by our former speakers of late. Maha Yahya, 2017 Camden Conference speaker and director of the Carnegie Middle East Center, wrote about “The Fatal Flaw of the New Middle East” in the most recent Foreign Affairs. While money is needed, “the main obstacle to the Arab world’s reconstruction will not be the lack of funds. It will be political disputes and grievances. The region is filled with failing states. It features competing powers that work to leverage this chaos to their geopolitical advantage. Together, these problems make permanent peace impossible,” she wrote.

Two-time Camden speaker and co-director of the NYU Center for Social Media and Politics Joshua Tucker argued in a comment to the Federal Trade Commission on alleged bias in social media platforms that: “While social media platforms disproportionately moderate posts from conservative users and sources, most research would suggest that this effect is likely driven by the asymmetric production of misinformation.” As evidence to confirm the theory that more conservative comments get struck from social media platforms because more of them are found to be inaccurate, Tucker and co-commentor Zeve Sanderson note that crowd-sourced moderation systems on X show more posts from conservative users gets flagged as containing misinformation than do offerings from liberal users.

David Brancaccio himself, on public radio’s “Living on Earth,” described what he and his wife Mary Brancaccio learned from their “brush with the climate crisis” as they toured the ruins of their recently purchased home after the fires in Altadena, California. Nicolas Burns, a previous moderator at several Camden Conferences who has just returned to Harvard after a stint as US Ambassador to China for the Biden Administration, suggested in a public radio interview with “The World” that a “trade deal ultimately is probably more likely to happen” between the US and China than a “sustained trade war.”