How Democracies Lose in Cyberwar
Andrea G
Moisés Naím / The Atlantic
In 2016, Russia used the American system against itself.
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Gas: The unique alternative
Andrea G
Moisés Naím / World Energy & Oil
We know the story: Mother Nature is sending increasingly loud and frequent signals that something new and dangerous is afoot. Regularly, climate scientists release incontrovertible data showing that climate is changing and offer robust explanations of why this is happening. We also know the other part of this story: Not enough is being done by peoples and governments to alter a trajectory that is guaranteed to force drastic changes in the human condition.
Read MoreThe Six Political Events That Have "Distorted" the World of Oil
Andrea G
Moisés Naím /World Energy & Oil
Attention to technological disruption has distracted observers from the fact that politics continues to be the most disruptive force of all in the oil and gas markets.
Read MoreAs Robots Take Our Jobs, Guaranteed Income Might Ease the Pain
Andrea G
Moisés Naím / The Huffington Post
Despite all its defects, a minimum income guarantee may well become an inevitable policy.
Read MoreVenezuela's Democratic Façade Has Completely Crumbled
Andrea G
Moisés Naím and Francisco Toro / The Washington Post
As Venezuela sinks deeper into the Western Hemisphere’s most intractable political and economic crisis, the time has come to ask some hard questions about how the Chávez regime could have conned so many international observers for so long.
Read MoreVenezuela Is Falling Apart
Andrea G
Moisés Naím y Francisco Toro / The Atlantic
Scenes from daily life in the failing state
Read MoreOld Diseases Made New
Andrea G
Moisés Naím / The Atlantic
How globalization exacerbated the wildly different problems of Zika, ISIS, and Donald Trump.
Read MoreThe Real Secret of Washington, D.C.
Andrea G
Moisés Naím / The Atlantic
It’s not all about politics, and in fact it’s an extraordinary city.
Read MoreThe Mediterranean surprise
Andrea G
Moisés Naím / World Energy & Oil
The cradle of civilization, this corner of the world has always been characterized by instability. Now, thanks to energy, it could become a new focal point of development and unexpected opportunities.
Read MoreWhat Is Idealogical Necrophelia?
Andrea G
Moisés Naím / The Atlantic
There are many reasons why bad ideas endure, but perhaps the most important is people’s need to believe in a leader amid rapid change.
Read MoreFor the Sake of the Climate, We Need to Know What Kind of Oil the U.S. Is Going to Export
Andrea G
Moisés Naím / The Huffington Post
The United States has never exported much crude oil — but that is likely about to change because congressional leaders recently lifted the country’s 40-year-old ban on crude oil exports.
Read MoreCan Putin Bomb His Way Out of Sanctions?
Andrea G
Moisés Naím / The Atlantic
Putin has turned a bombing campaign into new diplomatic leverage that can be deployed against sanctions.
Read MoreVenezuela: A Dictatorship Masquerading as a Democracy
Andrea G
Moisés Naím / The Atlantic
Democracy is not defined by what happens on Election Day, but rather by how the government behaves in between elections.
Read MoreHuman nature against Mother Nature
Andrea G
Moisés Naím / World Energy & Oil
Lately, Mother Nature seems to be trying to get our attention. Its signals are increasingly loud, strident and hard to miss. Some have been lethal. 2015 is poised to become the hottest year on record. Last October, Hurricane Patricia, the strongest ever recorded by meteorologists, produced record winds that reached 200 miles per hour. Average temperatures in the Artic have been increasing twice as fast as temperatures in the rest of the planet. This contributes to the thawing of the icecovered polar surface. Every 10 years, this ice cover shrinks by 9%. Scientists expect that polar thawing will raise sea levels to such a point that the populations of many highly urbanized coastal areas will be forced to move to higher ground.
Read MoreAfter Paris: War Is Not What It Used to Be
Andrea G
Moisés Naím / The Huffington Post
They used to be between tribes. Or city-states. Or one empire against another. Or between countries. Today, who wages war?
Read MoreThe World in Quotation Marks
Andrea G
Moisés Naím / The Atlantic
After visiting Argentina in the 1970s, the novelist V.S. Naipaul reflected on the “colonial mimicry” of Buenos Aires. “Within the imported metropolis there is the structure of a developed society. But men can often appear to be mimicking their functions,” he wrote. “So many words have acquired lesser meanings in Argentina: general, artist, journalist, historian, professor, university, director, executive, industrialist, aristocrat, library, museum, zoo: so many words seem to need inverted commas.”
Read MoreThe Coming Turmoil in Latin America
Andrea G
Moisés Naím / The Atlantic
Latin America has gone from a period of prosperity to a period of peril. Between 2004 and 2013, the region experienced extraordinary economic growth and social progress. Demand—mostly from Asia—for the commodities that constitute the region’s main exports increased sharply, pushing up both the prices of those exports and the volumes traded. Revenues from this trade, in turn, stimulated regional economies and helped fill governments’ coffers. This unprecedented demand coincided with a period of very low interest rates, abundant credit, and surging foreign investment flows into Latin America.
Read MoreWhat Pope Francis and Xi Jinping Have in Common
Andrea G
Moisés Naím / The Atlantic
Pope Francis and Chinese President Xi Jinping are, in many ways, worlds apart. One is the spiritual leader of 1.2 billion Catholics (over 40 percent of whom reside in Latin America) and the other presides over 1.4 billion Chinese. Pope Francis is a religious leader and Xi Jinping is a political one.
Read MoreThe Charades of Donald Trump and Alexis Tsipras
Andrea G
Moisés Naím / The Atlantic
Donald Trump and Alexis Tsipras couldn’t be more different. The sexagenarian Trump is an unabashed capitalist while the 40-year-old Greek prime minister joined the Communist Party as a teenager and since 2009 has led the radical-left Syriza party. The ostentatious American parades his multiple mansions and his fortune, which Forbes had the temerity to value at a meager $4 billion despite Trump’s claims that it “is in excess of TEN BILLION DOLLARS.” Tsipras, an engineer who has spent most of his life as a political activist, lives in a modest apartment in a working-class neighborhood of Athens. The prime minister rarely wears a tie, whereas the Donald J. Trump Collection offers “the pinnacle of style and prestige in the form of men’s suits, dress shirts, cuff links, neckwear, belts, eyewear, and more.” During political rallies, Trump likes to extol wealth while Tsipras denounces the growing gap between rich and poor.
Read MoreThe Clash Within Civilizations
Andrea G
Moisés Naím / The Atlantic
Friday, June 26 was a day of terror. In Tunisia, a gunman killed 38 tourists, nearly all of them European, at a beach resort. In Kuwait, a suicide bomber murdered 27 people at a Shiite mosque. In France, an assailant decapitated his boss and attempted to blow up a chemical plant. ISIS claimed responsibility for the first two attacks; the perpetrator of the third appears to have ties to radical Islamist groups.
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