Welcome, I'm Anastasia Glova bringing you the Cato Daily Podcast.

Full and edited versions of our podcasts are available on our website at

W.W. Kato.org.

Unlike last year's summit in Scotland, which focused primarily on development and the environment,

the G8 meets this weekend in Russia at a moment of confrontation with North Korea and Iran's

nuclear ambitions.

Cato Policy analyst Justin Logan analyzes the sensitive situation.

What's on the table for the G8 Summit in St. Petersburg?

The official agenda involves primarily a focus on energy security, and it will be

interesting to see what that discussion entails, as well as some sort of genuine global interests such as communicable disease.

I think education is also an official topic, but there are two sort of crises in the world that cannot be ignored,

obviously, those being Iran and North Korea and

those will be a topic of some discussion as well.

Russia's host and party to the G8 summit is at a critical position to influence talks this weekend.

I think that's right. I think they've been able to craft the official agenda which like I said is supposed to focus on energy security

and one hopes that the discussion of energy security

could get a little beyond what at least discussions in America of energy

security have entailed. Energy producing countries obviously have an interest in diversification of the consumers which they provide and

energy consuming countries have an interest in diversification of supply so that they can avoid supply shocks and problems such as that.

So I think that if the discussion of energy security gets beyond what we've had in this

country, I think what we will see, or I should say what I hope we will

see is a growing recognition that in a lot of cases the big industrialized democracies that make

...