Camden Conference in the World (December 2025)

“The largest humanitarian disaster” in the world today is unfolding in Sudan, reminiscent of the Darfur massacres decades ago, but with over 20 million suffering acute hunger and 12 million displaced, upcoming 2026 Camden Conference speaker Jeffrey Feltman explained in a recent episode of Brookings’ “The Current” Podcast. “There should be no political future” for either of the two military factions that created this catastrophe, each supported by different oil-rich Arab states. Rather, “the credibility belongs to these heroic Emergency Relief Rooms … a grassroots network that has been doing soup kitchens, essential services to beleaguered population across Sudan since this war broke out,” Brookings senior fellow and experienced US and United Nations diplomat Feltman says. However, lots of outside pressure will be needed to make that happen.

Bernard Haykel, another 2026 Camden speaker and a professor of New Eastern History at Princeton specializing in the Arab Gulf oil exporting countries, explained to Carnegie Endowment’s Aaron David Miller just ahead of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s state visit to Washington last month that “MBS” wants two things. First, Haykel told Miller, he wants “what every Saudi king has always wanted… a very strong strategic security alliance with the United States that will provide security for the Kingdom,” which is very rich but weak militarily relative to its neighbors, especially Iran. Second, he “wants to be able to transition… away from dependence on oil to a diversified production economy.”

MBS came away with both heightened security guarantees and a preliminary agreement involving AI datacenters and other potential tech investments in the Kingdom. However, “heated” words were exchanged when Trump tried to get the Saudi Crown Prince to normalize relations with Israel and join the Abraham Accords, reported Axios correspondent Barak Ravid, who will also be on stage in Camden at the upcoming Feb. 20-22 conference. MBS demanded that in return for a peace deal with Saudi Arabia, Israel should agree to “an irreversible, credible and time-bound path” for a Palestinian state, Ravid wrote.

Colin Woodard, a speaker from Camden’s 2025 Democracy Under Threat conference, wrote in a guest essay in the New York Times about the “battle raging across America” over what it means to be an American. The “civic” version “says that we Americans may lack a common history, religion or ethnicity, but what we share are the ideals in the Declaration of Independence,” wrote Woodard. The other, “exclusive and ethnonationalist” version, as described in detail this past summer by Vice President JD Vance, posits “a national identity based not on ideals, but on privileged heritage and bloodlines.” Woodard, an author and journalist now living in Maine, has a new book pending entitled Nations Apart: How Clashing Regional Cultures Shattered America.

Editor in Chief of Russia in Global Affairs and senior Russian foreign policy analyst and commentator Fyodor Lukyanov, a speaker at Camden’s 2015 Russia conference, wrote for the official Russia Today news site that he does not expect Washington to force Ukraine to accept the 28-point plan put forward by the Trump administration to resolve the Russia-Ukraine conflict. As a result, the fighting is likely to continue. “The 28-point plan may eventually serve as the basis for negotiations. But not yet. Ukraine and several Western European capitals remain attached to a vision of total moral victory. Washington is more sober, but not entirely unified. And the battlefield still speaks louder than conference tables.”