Camden Conference in the World ~ August 2024

Resonances from Camden’s 2018 Conference on “New World Disorder” are likely to be audible throughout our upcoming 2025 conference on “Democracy Under Threat: A Global Perspective.” The keynoter from that conference, and faculty chair of the Harvard Belfer Center’s International Security Program, Stephen Walt, says that while Donald Trump failed in his first presidency to bring ”far-reaching change” in US foreign policy, if there is a second Trump term, “the establishment will have more trouble reining him in.” One area where there might not be a big change from Trump’s first term, though, is the Mideast, Walt told the Carnegie Endowment’s Diwan blog. “The good news—such as it is—is that he will be disinclined to intervene militarily in the Middle East, even if his other actions make a regional conflict more likely,” Walt added.

Known for his outspoken views, Walt termed Israel’s pursuit of war in Gaza “a disaster for Israel and for the United States, although of course it is the citizens of Gaza… who have suffered most.”

Avril Haines, who shared the Camden stage with Walt in 2018 prior to her 2021 appointment as Director of National Intelligence, in July launched a series of regular updates from the US intelligence community “informing the public of foreign efforts to influence our democratic process” in the runup to the 2024 elections. “As I noted in testimony to the Congress in May, Iran is becoming increasingly aggressive in their foreign influence efforts, seeking to stoke discord and undermine confidence in our democratic institutions,” Haines wrote. Her statement attracted wide attention and led over 30 congressmen, including Maine’s Jared Golden, to request a classified briefing on the topic.

Another 2018 Camden Conference speaker, British academician and author of National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy, Matthew Goodwin, in his Substack blog accused the UK Conservative Party leadership of being in “cloud cuckoo land” for their failure to see right-wing nationalist Nigel Farage, not the victorious Labour Party, as the biggest threat to rebuilding their party after its recent electoral collapse.

US Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns, a multi-Conference speaker and moderator in Camden, says that the US-China relationship “is more stable now than it was in my first year here in 2022 and for much of 2023.” In an interview with the Center for Strategic & International Studies, Burns pointed as evidence of this greater stability to increased contacts between senior officials of the two countries, the first visit in five years to China by a Congressional delegation and also by a state governor – California Gov. Gavin Newsom – and high-level military communications that had been missing for some years. Burns also singled out climate change as an area in which China and the US can work together “productively,” even as he sharply criticized Beijing’s support for a massive buildup in manufacturing capacity for solar generation, batteries, and electric vehicles.

Not long before, China’s leading English-language daily, Communist Party-owned Global Times, featured a podcast commentary calling on Burns to be “more sincere and honest about the real obstacles” to China-US cultural exchanges.

Pictured, left to right: Stephen Walt, Avril Haines, Matthew Goodwin, Nicholas Burns