The collapse of the Al-Assad regime in Syria in early December led many news analysts to immediately seek out Joshua Landis, the well-known University of Oklahoma-based Syrian commentator who spoke in Camden in 2013, at the last Conference dedicated exclusively to the Middle East. Landis argued in an interview with Politico just after the takeover of Syia by Sunni Islamist forces under Abu Mohammed al-Jolani (a.k.a. Ahmed al-Sharaa) provides incoming US President Donald Trump with an important opportunity if he’s willing to take it: ”America has wanted a Sunni-led state in Damascus in order to hurt Iran. And Russia. And it’s now got it … why bite the hand that you wanted now?” Landis has a new book, Syria at Independence: Nationalism, Leadership, and Failure of Republicanism, due for release in 2025.
The keynoter for the 2013 Camden Conference, long-time New Yorker correspondent Robin Wright also brilliantly summarized the complexity and dangers of the situation in Syria following the fall of the regime that had ruled much of Syria for the last 35 years: “Now the scramble is on to define the future of Syria, quickly, to prevent ethnic, political, and sectarian rivalries from triggering a war even more divisive than the conflict that has riven the nation for thirteen years. Syria’s twenty-three million people include multiple Muslim sects, Christians, Druze, and Kurds. Both Ramadan and Easter are legally celebrated.”
Former Iranian nuclear negotiator and Princeton-based expert on Iran and the Middle East Seyed Hossein Mousavian conceded in a piece in the Middle East Eye that Assad’s fall was a “major blow” to Iran and its Axis of Resistance with the potential to spread “insecurity to Iran and Iraq.” Mousavian spoke in Camden in 2013 alongside Landis and Wright.
Demonstrating the breadth of Camden Conference themes, Public Radio’s “On Point” program in late December rebroadcast an interview in which MIT labor economist David Autor, a specialist in Artificial intelligence, argued that AI could help restore “the middle-skill, middle class heart of the U.S. labor market that has been hollowed out by automation and globalization.” Autor spoke on “The Enduring Economic and Political Consequences of the China Trade Shock” at Camden’s 2022 conference on “Global Trade and Politics.”
Pictured, clockwise: Joshua Landis, Robin Wright, David Autor and Seyed Hossein Mousavian