Camden Conference in the World ~ November

Iran has been a focus of several past and upcoming Camden Conference speakers over the last month. Vali Nasr, the famed Johns Hopkins SAIS professor who will be our keynoter at the upcoming February 2026 Conference on “Today’s Middle East,” describes the self-reliance Iran has developed to survive sanctions, and the debate happening inside Iran about its future, to the Downstream podcast, a product of independent, non-profit UK media organization Novara. Nasr has recently come out with a book on Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History, for which a chapter-by-chapter synopsis is already available.

Despite turning itself into “a huge airbase with a small country attached,” Israel has failed “to come close to subduing the region entirely,” argues 2005 Camden Conference speaker and renowned University of Michigan Iranian scholar Juan Cole. “What Tel Aviv has created is a negative version of hegemony rather than grasping any kind of positive leadership role,” Cole writes. His article that includes an historical tour of the use of aerial bombing that stretches across a century, from Britain’s occupation of Iraq between the world wars to the drones now harassing European airports. It appeared both in The Nation and in Tom Dispatch.

A war between Israel and Iran, possibly involving the US is “coming like a freight train” and “could go nuclear,” says 2012 Camden Conference speaker Col. Lawrence Wilkerson in an early October discussion with Nima Alkhorshid, the Iranian/Brazilian host of well-known podcast Dialogue Works. Whether Israel or Iran will start the war is uncertain, but Wilkerson says it could easily spread not just to US forces in the Mideast but to other countries in the region. Lawrence reports being told by contacts in Baghdad that Iraq “is getting ready to go to war.” Egypt might be involved, along with “remnants of forces in Lebanon, mostly Hezbollah.” Even Saudi Arabia and Qatar “might enter with air power.”

Fyodor Lukyanov, the 2015 Camden Conference speaker whose many titles in the Russian foreign policy establishment include Research Director of the prestigious Valdai International Discussion Club (where he not infrequently interviews President Vladimir Putin), proclaimed that, although “the liberal order is over,” the institutional infrastructure of foreign relations does – and is likely to — remain in place. Writing on the state-controlled website Russian Today, Lukyanov attributes this mostly to the complexity of establishing something new. The result will be that “international politics will resemble the 18th century more than the 20^th,” he concludes. “Rivalries will be fierce, wars will flare, but outright conquest will be rare.”

It has also been an active month for speakers from Camden’s 2021 Arctic Conference. Veteran Arctic diplomate and former US Ambassador for Oceans and Fisheries David Balton, who spoke alongside Mayewski at our 2021 conference, spoke to Arctic Today in Reykjavík during the Arctic Circle Assembly in late October. He pointed to two “shocks” that are threatening Arctic diplomacy. First is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and continued “belligerence.” Second is a foreign policy approach from the Trump administration that “runs counter to the spirit of Arctic diplomacy, which depends on trust and continuity built over years of meetings, field exercises and shared science.” As a result, ““The Arctic Council is actually still functioning, just not at the level it was before,” he said.

Climate scientist and glaciologist Paul Mayewski stepped down from as director of the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine and will dedicate more time to his climate research. The climate institute is under funding pressure from both Washington and the university. Incoming temporary director Dan Sandweiss will have to come up with a new vision and strategic growth plan for the institute, the Maine Monitor reported.

In another career move, Indira Lakshmanan, moderate of Camden’s 2018 Conference on “New World Disorder,” has been named a co-host of the live mid-day news program Here and Now, put out by Boston-affiliate WBUR and carried by over 500 National Public Radio stations. Lakshmanan is quoted by WBRU as saying that, after leaving her first job as an NPR correspondent, she has “reported and edited from six continents, plus Washington and Boston for national newspapers and magazines, two global wire services, radio, TV, and podcasts. I’ve come to realize that my first love and my greatest strength is in audio storytelling. Joining Here & Now as a co-host is the opportunity of a lifetime.”

Pictured, clockwise from top: Vali Nasr, Juan Cole, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Indira Lakshmanan, Paul Mayewski, David Balton