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Moisés Naím / Financial Times
As it begins the search for a new president of the World Bank, the Obama White House risks repeating the very same mistakes that all too often in the past have led to the wrong person being appointed.
Read MoreMoisés Naím / El País
What do Nicolas Sarkozy, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Vladimir Putin have in common? Well, all of them will soon be facing difficult electoral contests. The same goes for Barack Obama and Hugo Chávez. And many other presidents. This year there will be presidential elections or changes of heads of government in countries that together account for over half of the world economy. But this is not all. Even more significant is the fact that many leaders who must seek the people’s votes in upcoming months bear the responsibility of making decisions which, for better or for worse, directly influence the many, grave and simultaneous crises which are now shaking the world. And the demands of national politics are often at odds with those that emanate from international politics and economics.
Read MoreMoisés Naím / El País
This must the question that the Syrian tyrant asks himself every day. While the world’s democracies have discussed long and hard the options for bringing a stop to the slaughter, far less time has been spent identifying the options that remain for Assad himself. I imagine him contemplating his possibilities while he looks at two photographs taken last year. One of his lovely wife Asma in a flattering report that appeared in Vogue magazine, and the other of the dead body of Muammar Gaddafi. The first reminds him of a life and alternatives that he no longer has, while the second brutally illustrates his possible future. The hope, symbolized by Vogue's flattering article, that Assad might be able to reform the murderous dictatorship he inherited from his father, is now gone forever. The thousands of innocent people he has killed put an end to that. In which case, what possibilities remain? I see three:
Read MoreMoisés Naím / El País
You may not have heard of Lt. Colonel Davis of the US army, who now works at the Pentagon, after several tours of duty in Iraq and more recently, Afghanistan. Davis just returned and wrote a report that begins thus: “Senior ranking military leaders have so distorted the truth when communicating with the US Congress and American people in regard to conditions on the ground in Afghanistan that the truth has become unrecognizable. This deception has damaged America’s credibility both among our allies and enemies, severely limiting our ability to reach a political solution to the war in Afghanistan. It has likely cost American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars Congress might not otherwise have appropriated had it known the truth, and our senior leaders’ behavior has almost certainly prolonged this war. The single greatest penalty our nation has suffered, however, has been that we have lost the blood, limbs and lives of tens of thousands of American Service Members with little to no gain to our country as a consequence of this deception.” And this is just the public version of his report. He also produced a confidential version, for a few congressmen and senators with security clearances.
Read MoreMoisés Naím / El País
Daddy (Papá) is Hipólito Mejía, who wants to be president of the Dominican Republic. Llegó Papá! (Here is Daddy!) is his campaign slogan. His promise to the voters is that Daddy will give them what they don’t have and have never had. The elections are in May, and Mejía, who already was president between 2000 and 2004, may be re-elected despite the fact that during his tenure the country suffered a disastrous economic crash .
Read MoreMoisés Naím / Financial Times
The ancient Greeks thought that “those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.” For them, the surest way to destroy a person is to fill him or her with success, power, prosperity and fame. Excessive success induces inordinate self-confidence, which inevitably leads them to make disastrous mistakes and to failure. Hubris, they called it.
Read MoreMoisés Naím / Financial Times
Inequality will be the central theme of 2012. It has always existed and is not going away, but this year it will top the global agenda of voters, protesters and politicians running for office in the many important elections scheduled.
Read MoreMoisés Naím / Daily Beast
Recently a little-known but symptomatic incident occurred in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, a place symbolic of America’s deep South and once an important center of the Ku Klux Klan and its white supremacist ideas. Surprisingly, in this instance, the victim of a xenophobic and anti-immigrant local government was not a poor African-American or a Hispanic illegal immigrant. It was Detlev Hager, a 46 year-old German citizen and a Mercedes-Benz executive, a company that is one of the largest employers and foreign investors in the state.
Read MoreMoisés Naím / El País
A lot happened in 2011. This year's news roundups will surely be long and interesting. In this column I am not going to run through the main news stories but rather focus on five ideas that had a bad year.
Read MoreMoisés Naím / El País
Despite the widespread disenchantment with politics and politicians, there are two events that often engage even the most cynical and uninterested. Voting on election day is one of them. Everywhere, the number of people who actually abstain from voting tends to be lower than what the pre-election opinion polls suggested. On election day, something magical happens, and many of the erstwhile reticent stand in line and vote. The other magical events that engage even those least interested in politics are the televised debates between contending candidates.
Read MoreMoisés Naím / Financial Times
The elites didn’t revolt and the people didn’t take to the streets. What ended Silvio Berlusconi’s 17-year run as Italy’s most powerful man was the skyrocketing spread between Italian bonds and the German bunds. Had this stayed at under five per cent, Il Cavaliere would still be in power today.
Read MoreMoisés Naím / El País
Some weeks ago I was in Brussels, and by chance found I was sharing the same hotel as many members of the delegations to the EU summit, with whom I had numerous conversations after work or at breakfast. Their tales, anxieties and exhaustion (working nonstop through months dominated by emergencies, bad news and frustration) brought back many memories.
Read MoreMoisés Naím / El País
Today's emergencies are crowding the thinking about the long-term. The anxiety over Europe's economic crisis, the political infighting in the United States, social unrest in many other countries, and a possible slowdown of growth in China, are just some of the concerns about the immediate future that are preventing us from thinking beyond the coming weeks or months. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the think tank where I work, has just celebrated its 100th anniversary. Spurred on by the centenary, we are considering the dilemmas that will define the world in the coming century. Many will quickly dismiss such an exercise. Why bother? It is not very likely that the answers will turn out to be true and, in any case, we will not be around to see if we got it wrong - or to deal with the consequences. Yet, these are questions that stimulate interesting ideas and synthesize our options in a number of critical areas. Just thinking about alternative futures and the factors that will shape them helps us better understand where we are, where we might be heading, and which efforts are needed to take us closer to the more desirable scenarios.
Read MoreMoisés Naím / Financial Times
Being stuck in traffic is more bearable if the other lanes are moving. If all lanes are jammed for a long time, tempers flare. And if the police eventually arrive and let a few selected cars get out of their lanes and move through a special path, a riot is likely to ensue. This in short is the sentiment that propels the Occupy Wall St protests. We should take note.
Read MoreMoisés Naím / El País
His name is Mansour Arbabsiar, his nickname is "Scarface" and some of his friends in Texas, where he has lived for many years, call him Jack. He is one of Iran's James Bonds. If Jack is Teheran's 007, then Gholam Shakuri, a member of Iran's Al Quds unit, the special unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, may be 006. Abdul Reza Shahlai is perhaps the equivalent to Miss Moneypenny, who in the Bond movies was the secretary to M, the boss of all the spies.
Read MoreMoisés Naím / El País
While the world's attention remains glued to the crisis in Greece (population 11 million), in China (population 1.34 billion) things are going on that we are mistakenly overlooking. Should the world's economic engine stall, the consequences would be much more serious than any Greek problem, even taking into account its impact on the wider European economy. Here are a few boring facts about what is happening in China: manufacturing has fallen for the third consecutive month; the construction boom is about to bust; property prices are falling, and companies in the sector are finding it hard to access financing. Local government debt is now equivalent to 27 percent of the economy, and experts say that 80 of that debt cannot be recovered. Share prices of Chinese companies on the New York Stock Exchange fell on the news that regulators found serious faults in their accounts.
Read MoreMoisés Naím / El País
Denial (nothing's the matter). Rage (why me?) Negotiation (what can I do to postpone the inevitable?). Depression (why do anything more? It's all over). Acceptance (the world will go on). According to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, these are the five stages one goes through in facing death or catastrophic loss. Perhaps she never imagined how useful her schema would be in understanding the behavior of a government faced with a grave financial crisis. The Argentineans (several times), Brazilians, Mexicans, Russian and Asians passed through these stages. Now it is the turn of Europe (and the US, but that's another story). I do not know (and think nobody knows) how the present economic convulsions will evolve, or how the governments and the financial markets will react in their interminable interplay. We know that the 150 billion that the EU sent to Greece did not buy much, and that heretofore unimaginable austerity measures have been passed in Italy, Spain and other threatened countries. But nothing seems to work.
Read MoreMoisés Naím / Fox News Latino
The downgrade crisis, and the financial mess that preceded it, has resulted in a raft of doomsday-like pronouncements on the future of the United States.
Read MoreMoisés Naím / The Huffington Post
The main cause of coming conflicts will not be clashes between civilizations, but the anger generated by the unfulfilled expectations of a middle class, which is declining in rich countries and booming in poor countries.
Read MoreMoisés Naím / The Washington Post
Half of Venezuela’s population is under age 25 — meaning half the country can barely remember or imagine a leader other than Hugo Chavez.
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