Moisés Naím / The Atlantic
Silvio Berlusconi is out and Angela Merkel was reelected. Nelson Mandela and Hugo Chavez passed away. Fidel Castro didn’t. People took to the streets in Kiev and Bangkok, Cairo and Khartoum. The president of Syria ignored Barack Obama’s red line and used chemical weapons, while Iran was willing to engage in negotiations with the United States for the first time in 34 years. China elected a new leader and jailed another. North Korea’s tyrant-in-training executed his uncle.
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Moisés Naím / World Energy & Oil
Rising instability in some oil-producing countries could mean unprecedented challenges for Washington. The future may see conflict over shale gas’s environmental impact or disruption of the existing political order.
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Moisés Naím / The Atlantic
Hassan Rouhani, Iran’s president, has more cabinet members with Ph.D. degrees from U.S. universities than Barack Obama does. In fact, Iran has more holders of American Ph.D.s in its presidential cabinet than France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, or Spain—combined.
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Moisés Naím / The Atlantic
The collective mood of a nation mired in a prolonged economic recession shows many of the symptoms of clinical depression: despair, fatalism, an inability to make decisions, lack of motivation, and irritability. This is one of the impressions I got from a recent trip to Spain and Italy, two nations I know well and visit often. While both countries have recently made small strides on the path to recovery, I nevertheless came away with the strong sense that their economies are in recession and their societies are in depression. In the course of my travels, I also felt more than ever before that Europeans have fallen out of love with Europe—or, more precisely, with the idea of building a Europe-wide union.
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Moisés Naím / The Atlantic
As you shop for Thanksgiving dinner this year, you may long for the good old days when food was cheaper. This isn’t just your nostalgia speaking. Over the past decade, food prices have increased at a very fast clip. According to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, the global food price index has increased by 125 percent since 2000. To understand why, consider the seemingly intractable prices of global commodities markets—your standard agricultural goods like coffee, sugar, and wheat, or resources like crude oil and coal that are used to produce or transport those goods. Not only do these complex commodities markets determine the cost of what we eat, but their high prices can fuel the kind of social unrest that in some countries has toppled governments.
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Moisés Naím / The Atlantic
Let’s pretend you are the head of a government—a president, a prime minister, a chancellor. The director of your intelligence agency is seeking authorization on some potentially problematic operations. Here are two scenarios (as far as I know, they’re just the fictitious musings of one journalist, and have never actually happened). You be the decider.
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Moisés Naím / The Atlantic
Recently Angela Merkel has found herself in two complex situations. The first, as we all know, has stirred a bitter global debate about American spying. The second, though largely ignored, deserves at least as much attention because it may have even larger implications for international security. It’s about a prank using a drone.
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Moisés Naím / The Atlantic
Today, polarized electorates are the norm, and their votes offer no clear mandate to any party or candidate. That political conflict can result in full out governmental paralysis comes as no surprise… in Italy. Less so in the United States. But it does happen here too; and it is safe to assume that America's most recent "governance accident" won't be the last.
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Moisés Naím / The Atlantic
Some problems travel well. Sometimes too well. Financial crashes have taught us that in some cases what starts as a very local economic problem quickly escalates and becomes a global crisis. Think Greece—or more recently Cyprus. And we know that terrorism also has a way of going global in unpredictable and dangerous ways.
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Moisés Naím / The Atlantic
It’s that time of year again. Northern birds flock south for the winter, and the world’s bankers assemble in Washington for the annual meetings of the World Bank and the IMF. Finance secretaries and central bank governors from countless nations descend upon Washington to mingle with their colleagues, leaders of the World Bank, the IMF and the titans of global finance.
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Moisés Naím / World Energy & Oil
Inadequate water resources will be a destabilizing factor. Technologies and projects to deal with this problem already exist, but political initiative has been insufficient at best, and mostly non-existent.
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Moisés Naím / Financial Times
Amid all their vicissitudes, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency leaker, can rejoice in their good luck in at least one aspect: they are not Ecuadorian journalists. They are very lucky that the president of the nation aggrieved by their leaks is Barack Obama of the US and not Rafael Correa.
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Moisés Naím / Bloomberg Businessweek
What is happening in Brazil? Not so long ago, it was the toast of the global economy. More than 40 million Brazilians joined the middle class, the number of indigents plummeted, and the nation achieved the feat of reducing its legendary income inequality. The Latin American giant was awarded both the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics. It seemed to have finally buried the old cliche: Brazil is the country of the future … and always will be.
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Moisés Naím / World Energy & Oil
New operators, trade agreements, ownership structures, locations and technological innovations are pushing refining into hitherto unexplored places and situations.
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Moisés Naím / Financial Times
Latin America’s giant economy urgently needs someone like Facebook’s founder and chairman. Not to disrupt business models but to disrupt its immigration policies – like Mark Zuckerberg is now doing in the US.
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Moisés Naím / Financial Times
Scene 1. Carmen felt both exhausted and thrilled. Exhausted because her 78 years made the 15-hour bus ride too long. And thrilled because she had voted in Venezuela’s presidential election. To do so, she had to travel from Miami to New Orleans, the nearest place where Venezuelans living in South Florida could vote. The long journey was caused by President Hugo Chávez’ decision to close his country’s consulate in Miami. So the 20,000 Venezuelans who live there (most of whom are not Chávez supporters) had to choose between not voting or going to New Orleans. Thousands travelled on buses, cars or aircraft. They voted in the October presidential elections and – after Chávez’ death in March – again in the snap election on April 14 to elect his successor. Television channels in New Orleans broadcast surprising, and very moving, images of young people, couples with babies and elderly voters barely able to walk doing what was necessary just to be able to cast their ballot.
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Moisés Naím / Prospect Magazine
When I speak to university students, I often ask how many of them would want to join me if there was a butterfly endangered in Indonesia, and I was forming an organisation to save it. Inevitably, a few hands go up. Then, I ask how many would want to join me in one of the existing political parties. They all run for the doors.
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Moisés Naím / El País
The good news is that the US economy is recovering. The bad news is that, now that the crisis is easing off, the motivation to make the changes needed to stabilize America’s fiscal situation has evaporated. The imbalances between US government spending and its income will go on being problematical until reforms are made to increase the rate of saving, diminish the costs of the healthcare system, and reduce inequality in income.
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Moisés Naím / El País
Assume that you are the judge who has to decide who is lying in the following case:
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Moisés Naím / World Energy & Oil
Although the area holds immense riches, it is extremely difficult to translate this potential into reality. Critical environmental, technological, political and institutional questions remain unanswered.
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