US Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns talked with National Public Radio in June about US-Chinese relations and his own travels around China. A frequent past moderator and speaker at the Camden Conference, Burns started off by noting that while diplomacy is “sometimes about compromise,” it is sometimes also “defending your side. We have a number of major disagreements with China, and we’re not compromising.”

Nick’s successor as favored Camden Conference moderator, host of public radio’s “Marketplace Morning Report” David Brancaccio, interviewed Ian Bremmer on his thesis that the big global power players, in Brancaccio’s words, “may not be U.S. versus China versus EU, and so forth. It could be the clash of the tech titans.” Bremmer is founder and president of risk consultancy Eurasia Group. Brancaccio will be back with the Camden Conference this summer, for a “Conversation” on inequality in America Aug. 13 at the Strand in Rockland.

Staying on the China theme, 2022 CC speaker and director of the European Council on Foreign Relations Mark Leonard wrote in the latest Foreign Affairs: “While most Western leaders and policymakers try to preserve the existing rules-based international order, perhaps updating key features and incorporating additional actors, Chinese strategists increasingly define their goal as survival in a world without order.” And 2019 Camden Conference speaker and noted Chinese environmentalist Ma Jun talked to China’s own Global Affairs about 2023 potentially being the hottest year on record.

“People need a story of control, to counter stories of violence such as the Great Replacement,” Gerald Knaus, chair of the European Stability Initiative think tank and a speaker at Camden’s 2017 “Refugees and Global Migration” conference, told a gathering last month in Vienna on improving the state of European democracies. Knaus reportedly attributed the popularity of Prime Minister Viktor Orban among Hungarians in significant part to his “genius as a storyteller” about the Great Replacement theory, whereby Europeans on both sides of the Atlantic fear they may encounter a fate similar to the one they imposed on native populations during the colonial era.

Could this be the year when news publishers decide “to offer more hope, inspiration, and utility” to readers, as a counter to spreading “news avoidance and disconnection?” That’s the question with which 2020 Camden Conference speaker Nic Newman opens his introduction to Reuters Institute’s 2023 “Digital News Report,” compiled annually under Newman’s direction. The multinational report highlights building trends among publishers worldwide, including concerns for their business prospects and intentions to move more forcefully into subscription and membership models. He says we can also expect more newspapers to stop daily print publication over the coming year.