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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.
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.
This month, two years after his massive leak of NSA documents detailing U.S. surveillance programs, Edward Snowden published an op-ed in The New York Times celebrating his accomplishments. The “power of an informed public,” he wrote, had forced the U.S. government to scrap its bulk collection of phone records. Moreover, he noted, “Since 2013, institutions across Europe have ruled similar laws and operations illegal and imposed new restrictions on future activities.” He concluded by asserting that “We are witnessing the emergence of a post-terror generation, one that rejects a worldview defined by a singular tragedy. For the first time since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, we see the outline of a politics that turns away from reaction and fear in favor of resilience and reason.”
Sepp Blatter has been called the “most powerful man in sports.” But until recently, the nature—and durability—of that power was poorly understood. This past week, it was striking to watch Blatter, the long-serving strongman at FIFA, run the global soccer organization and get reelected to a fifth presidential term as if nothing had happened—as if the lieutenants surrounding him hadn’t just been accused of corruption and arrested by Swiss and American authorities, the latest in a series of scandals and corruption allegations that had tarnished the federation’s reputation for years. Ahead of easily winning the contest for FIFA’s highest office on Friday, Blatter said, “We don’t need revolutions but we always need evolutions. … I will fix FIFA.”
Will the United States remain the most powerful country in the world? Many think not. Those who feel this way also tend to think that China’s ascent will lead to America’s decline. Harvard professor Joseph Nye, who is not a declinist, begins his new book Is the American Century Over? noting that “in recent years, polls showed that in 15 of 22 countries surveyed, most respondents said that China either will replace or has already replaced the United Sates as the world’s leading power.” Its giant landmass and billion-strong population, combined with rapid economic, social, and military progress over the last few decades, make China an obvious candidate to overtake the United States as the primary shaper of world affairs. But the attention in the United States to China and other foreign threats obscures an important fact: America’s diminishment as a world power may be driven as much by the fraying of its domestic politics and chronic institutional gridlock as by the rise of rivals abroad.
Ten years ago, a survey published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives found that 77 percent of the doctoral candidates in the leading American economics programs agreed or strongly agreed with the statement "economics is the most scientific of the social sciences."
The 1990s was the era of the Washington Consensus—a suite of reforms, including privatization and open trade, that the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and U.S. Treasury Department urged governments around the world to adopt for their economies to prosper. That consensus has vanished with financial crashes in countries such as Mexico and Russia, the 2008 financial crisis, and the general disappearance of consensus in this politically fractured world.
What do Russia, Exxon Mobil, and ISIS have in common? Not much, except that they’re all grappling with an inconvenient but incontrovertible truth: a sudden, significant, and prolonged shift in the price of oil changes the world.
Until recently Vladimir Putin was customarily included in lists of the world’s most powerful people. Throughout a nearly 16-year reign, Putin’s brand of leadership—full of swagger, bare-chested photo ops, and tiger hunting—has brought him wide popularity at home and even grudging admiration abroad, a fact that was made clear by his selection as Time’s 2007 Person of the Year. “[He] makes a decision and he executes it—quickly. And then everybody reacts. That’s what you call a leader,” said former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani on Fox News last year. After Putin’s 2009 speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the CEO of one of the world’s largest companies told me, “He is a thug, but we have no option other than to deal with him and his cronies. He is just too powerful.”
Lower prices had a direct impact on exporting countries such as Russia and Venezuela. These impacts produced their own “second order” effects that are only just being felt. Many of these effects will be negative, but some will have positive results, as governments take the opportunity to initiate reforms.
Two beliefs safely inhabit the canon of contemporary thinking about journalism. The first is that the Internet is the most powerful force disrupting the news media. The second is that the Internet and the communication and information tools it has spawned—like YouTube, Twitter, or Facebook—are shifting power from governments to civil society and to individual bloggers, netizens, or citizen journalists.
Moisés Naím and Philip Bennett / Columbia Journalism Review
Two beliefs safely inhabit the canon of contemporary thinking about journalism. The first is that the internet is the most powerful force disrupting the news media. The second is that the internet and the communication and information tools it spawned, like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, are shifting power from governments to civil society and to individual bloggers, netizens, or “citizen journalists.”
The world is about to discover that the substantial and totally unexpected drop in the price of crude oil may be as disruptive as the shock of oil price hikes in 1974.
Recent news out of Russia, Venezuela and Cuba illustrate how the consequences are beginning to become apparent.
Moisés Naím, Thomas Carothers, Marwan Muasher, Lina Khatib, James M. Acton, Jan Techau, Eugene Rumer, Douglas H. Paal, Paul Haenle & Uri Dadush / Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
It was quite a year. The Year in Crisis, 2014, will be remembered for the upheaval that captivated the globe. And it won’t get any easier—the Ukraine conflict, rise of the Islamic State, and the Ebola epidemic aren’t over yet, and new concerns could be lurking just over the horizon.
The Ebola epidemic, ISIS’s ascent, and Vladimir Putin’s belligerence may be three of the most disruptive developments of 2014, but in 2015 they could all lose their potency. It’s hard to imagine such an outcome at the moment, of course, but then again most big news stories are devilishly difficult to predict.
It is always tempting to assume that conditions tomorrow will resemble those prevailing today. Weathermen call this the “rule of persistence.” Obviously, it’s not always accurate—seasons and geography, not to mention climate change, make a difference. And the rule is similarly faulty in the realm of international affairs.
As 2013 drew to a close, did anyone think that ISIS would suddenly become a formidable military force capable of invading Iraq? Or that Vladimir Putin would invade Crimea and destabilize Ukraine, prompting the West to impose tough economic sanctions on Russia? Who anticipated that the Ebola outbreak in West Africa would unleash a global panic or that oil prices would be in free fall? Nobody. Not governments, their militaries, or their intelligence services. Not international organizations like the World Bank or the IMF, or any large private banks or multinational companies. Not academics, editorialists, or futurists. Nobody.
In the coming year, Ebola will continue to claim lives, as some countries manage to contain its spread and others suffer fresh outbreaks. This dynamic is evident already; while the rate of new Ebola infections has dropped in Liberia, cases are up in Sierra Leone. But fortunately, the worst predictions about the crisis have not come true. Just a couple months back, the World Health Organization warned that there could be 10,000 new Ebola cases a week by December, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated a worst-case scenario of 1.4 million cases and hundreds of thousands of casualties by January 2015. In reality, the death toll is approaching 7,000 and the total number of cases is roughly 16,000. In October, the World Bank predicted that Ebola could cost sub-Saharan Africa $32 billion by the end of 2015, but a more recent analysis reduced that estimate to $3 to $4 billion.
ISIS too is receding. Its military operations will continue and at times succeed in the territory it has amassed in Syria and Iraq, and individuals and cells directed or inspired by ISIS will still attack targets in other countries. But the Islamic State’s financing, leadership, mobility, and weapons are already contracting. According to West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, ISIS derived much of its initial power from the unpreparedness of its enemies. But the group now faces a hitherto unimaginable alliance of more than 60 nations from Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. While most of these nations are playing no direct combat role, they do create a web of constraints that makes it harder for ISIS to retain its military capabilities. Indeed, since the international campaign against the Islamic State began, the organization has not made any real gains. “ISIS can only expand in areas where it can enter into partnerships with the local population, and that largely limits the scope of the expansion of ISIS to Sunni, disenfranchised areas,” my colleague Lina Khatib, told The New York Times.
In 2015, Vladimir Putin’s weaknesses will probably be more destabilizing than his strengths. Like ISIS, Putin has stimulated previously unthinkable alliances of Western nations bent on curbing his geopolitical misdeeds. The decisions of the Russian president have isolated his country and gravely damaged its already frail economy, which is reeling from a drop in oil prices, massive capital flight, and severe economic sanctions. The danger, of course, is that Putin could choose to pick fights abroad as a distraction from Russia’s domestic woes.
These are, at least, the trend lines of these stories heading into 2015. But it is useful to remember—ahead of what will surely be a torrent of year-end predictions—that what will transform the world in the coming year is ultimately unknowable. All one can do is look for clues to the surprises in store—whether they come in the form of a cyberattack, a climate disaster, instability in oil-exporting countries struggling with falling crude prices, or none of the above. After all, by December 2013, the seeds of 2014’s biggest stories were already planted: the newly named Islamic State of Iraq and Syria was challenging the Nusra Front for territory in Syria, Ebola had broken out in Guinea, and major protests were building in Kiev.
We will all be wiser if we pay heed to the rule of impersistence in geopolitics—and accept that in 2015, as in 2014, and most years before that, the events that disrupt the world will take everyone by surprise.
A young Mexican president assumes office and surprises the world, not least his own nation. He proposes unprecedented reforms that don’t just clash with the entrenched ideologies of his party, the ever-mighty PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party), but also with some of the country’s most powerful interests: hitherto untouchable economic titans, union bosses, and local chieftains. International observers laud the potential of the reforms to make Mexico less corrupt, and more prosperous and just. But at home, the reforms are met with distrust and seen by many as just another ploy that will benefit the greedy elites who build fortunes on the backs of the poor. Analysts and academics take to opinion pages and talk shows to predict that the reforms will have devastating social effects. Leftists and nationalists alike equate the reforms with submission to yanqui imperialism. Businessmen, too, oppose the reforms, which will increase competition and thus threaten their firms’ market dominance. The reforms may promise hypothetical benefits in the long term, but in the short term they pose tangible costs to these disparate and politically influential groups.
American voters are furious with their government and their politicians. That is the central message of the recent midterm elections. In explaining the electoral results, many analysts have stressed the anxiety about the future that led voters to reject their current leaders, especially the president, whose popularity has sunk. This summer, when pessimism was peaking, more than three-quarters of American adults felt their children would be worse off than they are.