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Filtering by Category: El País
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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Much has been said about the failure of the Summit of the Americas. It was the worst organized meeting of presidents since Bill Clinton convened his peers from around the hemisphere in 1994 to agree on initiatives on economic integration and the strengthening of democracy. In fact, it’s difficult to imagine a blander or more mediocre Summit of the Americas than those we’ve seen over the past 28 years. But – somehow – Biden and his team did it. And to be fair, they had help from Latin America’s short-sighted leaders. The Summit was a shameful display of hypocrisy, mendacity, political necrophilia and boundless bureaucratic mediocrity. The opportunity to shore up the region’s fractured democracies or launch ambitious initiatives to bolster their anemic economies was wasted.
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This past decade has been rich in world-changing events. Some were impossible to ignore, but others were more gradual and went almost unnoticed. Among the most important of these is the global crisis of democracy.
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They can’t be more different. Putin is a genocidal dictator, and Musk is a brilliant inventor.
The Russian leader is responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people. Elon Musk is responsible for the world’s best-selling electric cars, for pioneering innovations in battery technology and for technological advances such as Paypal that allow for digital payments. He’s also behind SpaceX, which builds rockets that can be launched into space, recovered and quickly reused. Then there is the hyperloop – a pneumatic mass transit system that will be able to carry people and goods very fast over long distances. And don’t forget Neuralink, a company whose mission is to develop technologies that will allow the brain to communicate wirelessly with a computer.
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Would he actually do it? Is Vladimir Putin really such a nihilistic sociopath with so little regard for human life that he would use nuclear weapons against his enemies? Or is he, rather, a clever negotiator who uses the nuclear threat to extract concessions from his rivals? These are the questions that are keeping America’s diplomats, generals, and spies – as well as America’s allies – up late at night.
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Early in his presidency, in 2000, Putin gave a long televised interview. He spoke of his vision for the future of Russia, shared memories of his youth, and reflected on what he had experienced, including a lesson he’d learned from a rat. When he was very young, Putin and his parents lived in a small apartment in a run-down building in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) that, among other problems, was infested with rats. The young Putin used to chase them with a stick. “There, I received a quick and lasting lesson in the meaning of the word ‘cornered,’” Putin said in the interview. And added: “Once I spotted a huge rat and pursued it down the hall until I drove it into a corner. It had nowhere to run. Suddenly it lashed around and threw itself at me. Now the rat was chasing me. Luckily, I was a little faster and I managed to slam the door on its nose.”
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For months, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that he had no intention of invading Ukraine, but on February 24 he did just that. Since then, surprises have been the norm. Putin himself was surprised, since it is now obvious that things have not turned out as he had planned. The dictator overestimated the effectiveness of his armed forces and underestimated those of Ukraine. A devastating cyberattack by the Russians, for example, has yet to take place and Putin’s army shows unexpected signs of disorder and has been forced to improvise.
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As images of Russian troops surrounding Ukraine grab headlines, the United States Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has published an important report. Its main conclusion is that, in the next 30 years, sea levels along the US coast will rise as much as they did during the entire 20th century. To put that into context, consider that in the last 100 years sea levels rose faster than in the previous 2,000 years. Another fact: 40% of Americans live in coastal areas, and a significant portion of the country’s economic activity occurs therein. It’s a global problem and, of course, the rise in sea levels is just one of the many manifestations of climate change.
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We all know that a Rolls-Royce is one of the most expensive cars in the world. What you may not know is that last year they sold more cars than ever – 49% more than the previous year – making it the best year since the company was founded in 1906. And they aren’t the only automaker that had a bumper year. Ferrari also reported record profits in 2021.
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“Friends of the Earth warn that we have lost precious time in the race to bring climate change under control.” “The UN secretary-general expresses disappointment with the inconclusive outcome of the climate change conference.” “The South criticizes the North for failing to keep its promises on climate change.” “The agreement was weak, even if we meet each goal, we will not get to where we need to be.”
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The proliferation of autocrats who love to stage presidential elections is a surprising political phenomenon. Of course, we’re not talking about free and fair elections that a dictator might lose. Oh no. What they want is an exercise that gives off the illusion – or at least the passing aroma – of democracy, but where their victory is securely guaranteed. And the strange thing is that, even though people both inside and outside the country know it’s all a sham, autocrats near and far continue to put on these threadbare electoral shows.
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At the end of July, Wendy Sherman, the US deputy secretary of state, paid an official visit to Tianjin, in northwest China. There she met with her counterpart, Vice Foreign Minister Xie Feng. The purpose of the visit was to reduce tensions between the two countries.
It didn’t work.
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Having breakfast. In Lima, Peru.
Powell, who was the US secretary of state at the time, had accepted an invitation from Peru’s then-president, Alejandro Toledo, to a breakfast at the Presidential Palace. But Powell had not traveled to Lima just to meet Toledo. He was representing his country in what promised to be a historic meeting: on that particular September 11, 34 countries in the Americas were about to commit to strengthening and defending democracy. The document to be signed – the Inter-American Democratic Charter – enshrined the principle that “the peoples of the Americas have a right to democracy and their governments have an obligation to promote and defend it.”
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“The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves.”
Read MoreMoisés Naím / El País
Dramatic international developments that affect us all are becoming more frequent. Some touch us directly and others reverberate around us. But the daily news leaves us with the feeling that we are in a time of great change.
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