Gerald Seib, recently retired executive Washington editor for the Wall Street Journal, talked to National Public Radio podcaster Diane Rehm  in August about his recent reporting on “No Labels and the Prospect of a Third-Party Presidential Bid.” No Labels has been around for 13 years and aims to create a center ground in Congress and, more recently, perhaps the presidential race as well, 2018 Camden Conference speaker Seib explained. It has gotten a place on the ballot in 10 states but doesn’t yet have a candidate. Without predicting whether No Label will run a presidential candidate or not, Seib does see a good chance that the US “may end up with multiple third-party candidates in the 2024 election,” including Cornel West, for the Green Party, and perhaps Robert Kennedy Jr. as a Libertarian.

Mark Leonard, founder and director of the European Council on Foreign Relations and a 2022 Camden Conference speaker, provocatively suggests in a recent Project Syndicate article that Hungary and Canada are “beginning to trade places” in their international strategic outlooks. From “a paragon of free-trading globalization,” Canada increasingly “seems to have abandoned the idea of a universalist order in favor of one that excludes states motivated by values that depart from its own.” In contrast, Hungary, previously “the poster child of nationalism,” is now striving to find “a sweet spot between China and the United States, rather than choosing one over the other.” The key outstanding question Leonard sees for Europe is whether Germany will choose the Hungarian way or the Canadian way.

On the related issue of the expansion of the China-dominated BRICS organization at its recent gathering in South Africa, another 2022 CC speaker who is now with Germany’s Bertelsmann Stiftung, Daniela Schwarzer, says the accession of major oil exporters Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the UAE to the group along with three others “is a strategic success” for BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). Western leaders should “understand this enlargement as an attempt to establish a serious counterweight to the G7.”