Moisés Naím / El Pais

Last year, global military spending surged by nearly 7%, marking the largest increase since 2008, according to researchers at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Collectively, governments expended over $2.4 trillion on military personnel, equipment and weaponry. That is 2.4 million times a million dollars.

Moisés Naím / El Pais

On the fateful morning of August 6, 1945, the United States dropped a bomb that obliterated the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later, Nagasaki suffered the same fate. The Japanese Empire realized that without surrender, its territory would be devastated. Thus, 24 days after the bombing of Nagasaki, the Emperor signed the unconditional surrender of Japan.

Moisés Naím / El Pais

His name is Leonard Glenn Francis, but everyone called him Fat Leonard. His company, Glenn Defense Marine Asia, made him very wealthy. His business was supplying — food, fuel, etc. — to U.S. Navy ships in Asian ports. Fat Leonard became good friends with the American admirals and captains who went to his parties. He was a generous host, and everybody knew that his already large fortune continued to grow.

Something similar happened with Alex Saab. He is a key financial operator for Nicolás Maduro and his associates worldwide. Saab started with a small trucking company in Colombia but moved to Caracas and quickly gained the trust of influential players in the Bolivarian Revolution. Relying on his new friends, he began to launch increasingly ambitious business schemes.

Moisés Naím / El Pais

Earthquakes are geological surprises and human tragedies. They produce enormous suffering and massive damage. But they also reveal hidden truths about the deepest recesses of the planet. For scientists, an earthquake opens up a window into what’s happening under the earth’s crust.

Moisés Naím / El Pais

Ten years ago, we thought we understood how China worked. The Asian giant had left Mao Zedong's dictatorship behind and was becoming a hybrid entity, neither capitalist nor socialist but always pragmatic. Leadership was no longer exercised by one person but by a collegiate institution—the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. In that body, the country’s top seven leaders would hash out the policies of the state.

Moisés Naím / The Wall Street Journal

When Javier Milei is sworn in as Argentina’s new president on Sunday, it will mark a historic first: Never before has a doctrinaire libertarian been elected to lead a country. Milei ran on a radical campaign of deep cuts in spending and taxes, and ditching the Argentine peso in favor of the U.S. dollar.

Moisés Naím / El País

Argentina has chosen to live through interesting times. In Javier Milei, they elected a president as far from politics as usual as it is possible to imagine. Because Milei is many things: an orthodox libertarian economist, a born-for-TV right-wing provocateur with a larger than life ego, a dog-cloning enthusiast with a penchant for esoteric mysticism, and a power-oriented politician willing to build alliances with people he’s spent years berating. The trouble is, we’re not quite sure which one of them is going to end up governing Argentina.

Moisés Naím / El País

2.4 trillion dollars. With a “t”. A two, a four, and then eleven zeroes. That’s the astronomical figure needed to confront climate change. And not just once. That’s the amount that would have to be spent year after year just to avoid the worst impacts of the changes we’ve made to our atmosphere. No one actually knows how to raise such a sum or who will pay it. But we had better figure it out.

Moisés Naím / El País

Much has been said about the “democratic recession,” meaning democracy is retreating in many parts of the world. But there is another recession, less well-publicized, that goes hand in hand with the first and could be more damaging: the global rule of law recession.

Moisés Naím / El País

This is new. Nothing like this has ever happened before. Many of us shared these thoughts last week after first —and correctly— recoiling horror and indignation at the barbarity of Hamas.

Despite the countless tragedies that Israel has suffered in its 75-year history—ranging from full-scale wars to terrorist attacks—it has never experienced a military assault on this scale targeting its civilian population

Moisés Naím / El País

Once upon a time, a king was bathing in the river when a badly wounded deer came down to the water to birth. Overwhelmed with compassion, the king adopted its newborn fawn as his pet

Moisés Naím / El País

It’s easy to imagine the Internet as an ethereal, immaterial phenomenon. We go about our days connecting to wireless networks and storing our data in the "cloud" with the reasonable assumption that our information is safe as it flows from one part of the world to another.

Moisés Naím / El País

One of the critical debates of our time is how to deal with dictators. In dozens of countries there is a fierce clash between those who will only accept the unconditional defeat and the eventual prosecution of a dictator and his cronies and those who are willing to accept horrible concessions in order to establish a democracy.

Moisés Naím / El País

While the world is preoccupied with climate change, war and artificial intelligence, another profoundly transformative phenomenon is in full swing: space exploration. And getting to where we are today is just part of a long and fascinating history. In 1957, the Soviet Union launched a rocket into space. It carried a polished 23-inch metal sphere that weighed 185 pounds and had four antennas. This first artificial satellite, Sputnik, sparked a fierce race between the United States and the Soviet Union to achieve technological dominance in space. A lot has changed since then.

Moisés Naím / El País

Changing times infuse new importance into some words, while marginalizing or completely transforming others. “Platform” is a good example of this. The word used to refer primarily to — according to Merriam-Webster — ”a flat horizontal surface that is usually higher than the adjoining area.” Not anymore.

Moisés Naím / El País

New scientific discoveries and technological innovations are often exalted as harbingers of sweeping change. However, few of these “breakthroughs,” live up to the hype. Instead, they are overtaken by other discoveries or technologies that go beyond what had initially been seen as a life-altering historic contribution.

Moisés Naím / El País

Can a military superpower maintain its global dominance even if its population is shrinking? What about when its population is aging and will soon be dominated by the elderly? These are not hypothetical questions; they are happening right now. Russia is depopulating and China is aging rapidly. And these are not the only demographic woes that are weakening these two nuclear powers.

Moisés Naím / El País

Bibi, the prime minister of Israel, and AMLO, the president of Mexico, couldn’t be more different. At the moment, however, their political strategies could not be more similar. Both are trying to change the politics of their respective countries in profound ways, and both are doing so using profoundly undemocratic means.

Moisés Naím / El País

The world’s governments are currently dedicating enormous resources to containing Covid-19 and its mutations. Fortunately, they are succeeding. What is less fortunate is that they are neglecting another pandemic that has been claiming millions of lives each year, as well as disabling thousands more – mental illness.

Moisés Naím / El País

Just mentioning certain years in history like 1789 (the French Revolution), 1945 (the end of World War II) or 1989 (the fall of the Berlin Wall) is enough to bring to mind profound transformations. So it’s worth asking, what will we eventually look back on as the first iconic year of the 21st century?

Moisés Naím / Politico

History, Karl Marx once wrote, repeats itself first as tragedy, and then as farce. The old quip kept coming to mind as we saw thousands of Brazilian far-right extremists stage a half-baked revolt in the capital, Brasilia. So far it amounts to a kind of low-rent reenactment of the Jan. 6 insurrection in Washington, D.C.

Moisés Naím / El País

At the end of each year since 2003, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary announced its selection of the English word of the year. According to the respected dictionary founded in 1831, “gaslighting” was the most searched-for word on the internet in 2022. Peter Sokolowski, the dictionary’s editor, told the Associated Press that this year searches for the word increased by 1,742%. The editor also noted that it was in the top 50 most searched-for words every day.

Moisés Naím / El País

Why do societies and their governments passively tolerate bad ideas? Why are so many obviously failed public policies impossible to reform? The list of countries whose governments cannot or dare not confront their policy taboos is long and varied. Take drug policy, as an example.

Moisés Naím / El País

Mohamed bin Salmán, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia; Xi Jinping, the president of China; and Tsar Vladimir Putin have plenty of things in common. Add this one to the list: all three have championed anti-corruption drives. Dictators all over the world have. Not surprisingly, they found plenty of corruption. Some of the accused were sentenced to death, and most others received long prison sentences.

Moisés Naím / El País

Which economy will grow fastest in the next few years? Try to guess. Perhaps you are thinking of Vietnam, which has been steadily taking market share from China, which has hamstrung itself through its Draconian zero-Covid policy. Or the African champion of growth, Rwanda, whose economy has quintupled since 1995. Or Bangladesh, whose export sector is the catalyst for Asia’s biggest boom.

Moisés Naím / El País

They say that we have reached the end of globalization. Just look around. Trump’s protectionism, Brexit, supply chain problems created by Covid-19 and Putin’s criminal aggression in Ukraine have all helped derail the wave of global integration that was triggered by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Surely, with the stock market crashing, interest rates on the rise and a looming global economic slowdown, we have arrived at globalization’s funeral and the bells are tolling.

Moisés Naím / El País

In Italy, an old video has been making the rounds. It shows a beautiful young woman saying things that are not so beautiful. Donning 1990s fashion, her body turned to the back from the front seat of a car, she answers questions for a French television reporter in good if accented French. “For me, Mussolini was a good politician,” she says. “Everything he did, he did for Italy, and that is something that is not found in the politicians we have had in the last fifty years.”

Moisés Naím / World Energy & Oil

To counter this phenomenon, Qatar has experimented with a solution that combines a traditional monarchy, a large working class made up of foreigners and a stubbornly independent democracy. It remains to be seen whether this recipe will hold up to the energy transition.

Moisés Naím / Politico

2022 is turning into a lean cow year. The expression is familiar to educated Latin Americans, though only the most biblically astute Anglos seem to know it. It comes from Genesis, and it goes all the way back to the age of the Egyptian pyramids.

Moisés Naím / El País

Colombia has just elected its next president, Gustavo Petro. Despite his long political career, the president-elect presents himself as an outsider who is out to dislodge the long-ruling elites from power. That’s the same promise made by Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico, Gabriel Boric of Chile, Pedro Castillo of Peru, Alberto Fernández of Argentina, and several other Latin American presidents. On October 2, Brazil will hold elections and it is almost certain that the current President Jair Bolsonaro will face off against former president Lula da Silva.