Camden Conference in the World ~ March

Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a lively speaker at Camden’s recent India conference, didn’t take long getting back into print with his concerns on the Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi. In the Indian Express, where he is currently a contributing editor, Mehta had faint praise for recent Indian Supreme Court decisions that overturned campaign funding rules announced by the Modi government and handed a disputed municipal election in Chandigarh to the opposition. Noting the court’s “track record of facilitating the Executive’s authoritarian or repressive agenda,” the court’s decision ”provides a sliver of hope to hang on to,” Mehta writes, but does not “portend a pathway to regeneration just yet.”

Our 2018 New World Disorder conference keynoter Stephen Walt recently talked to National Public Radio about the “restraint” approach he advocates for US foreign policy and how it differs from isolationism. “Restraint is a policy that suggests the United States should be fully engaged in the world. We should trade, we should invest, we should have active diplomacy, and we should have a strong military. There are some circumstances where the United States should be willing to use military force, but we should be using it much less often than we have been doing of late,” Walt told NPR’s Scott Simon.

Several speakers from Camden’s 2022 Europe Challenged conference have been grappling with the question of how forcefully the EU will step up to fill the gap in support for Ukraine left by the US as long as Congress balks at providing further funding.

After last month’s Munich Security Conference, Mark Leonard described the silver lining he sees to the dark cloud cast by a prospective second Donald Trump presidency: Trump “has forced Europeans finally to rethink the core assumptions that have been hamstringing them with regard to the war in Ukraine, Europe’s own defense, and European political unity.” Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, originally wrote this commentary for Project Syndicate.

Daniela Schwarzer was less optimistic in her takeaway from Munich, bemoaning “the lack of leadership and coordination” that buried some “good news” of European support for Kviv in the runup to the Munich gathering. Schwarzer is now a member of the executive board of the Bertelsmann Foundation.

“Central European and Baltic states have been the driving force of the EU’s response to Russia’s war on Ukraine,” wrote 2022 alumna Judy Dempsey last month in her Strategic Europe column for Carnegie Europe. Having successfully campaigned to get negotiations started on bringing Ukraine into the EU, these independent-minded countries now face a decision on “how far they are prepared to cede more sovereignty to Brussels,” Dempsey notes, as part of ongoing talks among member states on voting procedures within the bloc.

Have you wondered amid all this debate over Ukraine why Tucker Carlson wanted to interview Vladimir Putin and why the Russian President took Carlson’s bate in early February? Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of Russia in Global Affairs  and a 2015 Russia Resurgent Camden Conference speaker, sees it as the opposite of alleged Russian interference in American politics in earlier US elections. This time, the US – in the form of the “strongly ideological” American commentator Carlson — is “dragging the Russian factor” into America’s own political process. “The goal wasn’t to learn or broaden horizons. The Putin interview was a challenge to the establishment in his home country,” Lukyanov adds.

The Western push to avoid reliance on China and Russia as the US and EU ramp up efforts to convert to renewable energy is adding to threats the Sami people indigenous to Northern Norway and adjacent Arctic states already face from climate change itself, Saami Council environmental unit leader and a speaker at Camden’s 2021 Arctic Conference Gunn-Britt Retter told the Singapore-based Straits Times in an interview during this winter’s Arctic Frontiers conference in Tromso, Norway. “It is not only the climate which is impacting us, but also the response measures,” she said, pointing to larger rare-Earth and copper mines on Sami land, as well as wind turbines that are seen as disturbing reindeer migration paths.