Chatham House associate fellow Cleo Paskal recently explored another fascinating niche angle of the changing geopolitical landscape: Britain’s expanding post-Brexit role as a counter to China in several small Pacific countries that are also in the Commonwealth. Paskal, a popular favorite at the 2018 conference on New World Disorder and America’s Future who will be returning to Camden Aug. 14 for a Camden Conference friendraiser, writes regularly for India’s Sunday Guardian and other Indian newspapers.

Natalie Nougayrede, a companion speaker of Paskal’s in Camden in 2018 and a regular columnist in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, calls French President Emanuel Macron “a poster boy for radical centrism in an age of democratic retrenchment and rampaging populism,” in an assessment of Macron’s recent state visit to Washington.  

Those already looking forward to next year’s conference on China might want to check out this conversation from last month on US-China relations between 2018 speaker and former Obama  White House staffer Evan Medeiros and Carnegie Endowment Senior Associate Yukon Huang. Also in April, Medeiros’s colleague from President Barack Obama’s national security team and another Camden Conference 2018 speaker, Avril Haines, was named a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

Syrian refugees maintain that they won’t return to Syria in large numbers unless they can go to their home towns, find jobs and feel safe. That’s the key finding in a Carnegie Middle East Center report on Unheard Voices: What Syrian Refugees Need to Return Home, co-authored by Maha Yahya, a speaker at the 2017 conference on Refugees and Global Migration.

Wall Street Journal columnist and another 2018 Camden Conference speaker, Gerald Seib, in a recent Fox News Sunday panel bemoaned Washington’s fixation with 2016. “The deeper reality here is that democracy is — is under attack. And not just from Russia and not just in 2016,” Seib said.