Moisés Naím, the author, has some serious street cred. He is a Distinguished Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In 2013, the British magazine Prospect listed Naím as one of the world’s leading thinkers. In 2014 and 2015, Naím was ranked among the top 100 influential global thought leaders by Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute (GDI) for his book The End of Power. The classics were sometimes profoundly critical of their world and ours. I admire the clarity with which Euripides discards the glitter of legend to denounce the widespread brutality. During wartime, he dared to take the side of the women instead of the men, the enemy instead of his compatriots, and the losers instead of the winners. Over time, Hecuba has spoken anew in the name of the victims, before we could begin to forget. One of the reasons, he thinks, is that there is too much change for a lot of people, and politics lines up along the levels of anxiety that induces. ‘People who are relatively open to new experiences have sorted themselves into the center-left, while the threat-averse identify largely with the right.’

The mortal enemy of freedom is power. The gradual defeat of power by freedom and democracy we enjoy is being slowly strangulated by power returning to battle in unsuspecting hidden ways and means. That is why the book is titled “The Revenge of Power”. The result, in Naim’s view, is a hollowing out of democracy. ‘Political parties may survive in some form, the way vestigial wings do on flightless birds’. Ditto other ‘old institutions’ – legal, media, and social – ‘that once mediated between citizens and rulers’.Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. That I guess goes to a final question that we can discuss Moisés, and that is the integration economically between authoritarian countries, like you would consider Russia and democracies. This is such a big conversation, topic of conversation with respect to European integration with Russia's energy market in particular. That has left Europe soft on the human rights questions when it comes to Putin, because they don't want to get their energy supplies cut off or see price go up so much. Byron describes the banking aspect of this that would leave some in Europe vulnerable. Is there a way out of that? Naim frames this in terms of ‘3P’s. The new ‘3P autocrats’ have a formula for ‘a malignant new form of power’: Populism, Polarization and Post-Truth On 23 April, a day in which Sant Jordi is celebrated in Catalonia (the day of the book and the rose), I recommended the following book to a person during a conversation: The Four Agreements: A Toltec Wisdom Book by Miguel Ruiz. It is a book that I read more than 15 years ago. It helped me a lot because it made me aware of things that were not working quite well in my life and allowed me to change and my perspective. For me, it was and still is a very powerful book. It is easy to understand, although not easy to apply. The good thing is that it has no age and that it goes directly to its essence with clarity. We know that there are no miracle recipes, but at least for me, trying to put some of these agreements into practice helped me transform things at an individual level. In some way, each of us is seeking our own path, and I believe that it is through the sum of individual changes and shared efforts that we can achieve a more global collective change.

Moisés Naím: Well, depends on the definition of that. If that is democracy and European democracy is dealing with the difficult balancing act of imposing sanctions, but making sure that they don't hurt their own populations and businesses and economy in significant ways, that is a very important conversation that I'm sure it has been taking place in the corridors of power in Europe and the United States and elsewhere for a while. Again here, I suggest that instead of looking at the immediate consequences and that Brian mentioned one that is quite important and relevant, which is the debt held by European and international banks of Russian debt. Brian Lehrer: Yes, or that level of accountability, really. Do you have a sense of where the line is between authoritarian, despot and war criminal? Anything you see in Ukraine that could actually trigger a war crimes investigation by the United Nations or the World Court? Naim also served as the editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy magazine for 14 years (1996–2010, and he’s the former Minister of Trade and Industry for Venezuela, Director of its Central bank, and Executive Director of the World Bank. Immediately, researchers noticed a rush of neural activity in the caudate nucleus. This is the part of the brain known to process rewards.Populists portray a political realm neatly cleft in two: the corrupt, greedy elite versus the noble and pure – but betrayed and aggrieved – Volk, the people. The End of Power makes a truly important contribution, persuasively portraying a compelling dynamic of change cutting across multiple game-boards of the global power matrix." -- Washington Post Moisés Naím: Yes, absolutely because he casts doubts. He presents populists, one of the hallmark of populists is not only the divide and conquer, but also to offer a promised land where the desires of the people are met in very rich ways. That end up not being true and I don't have any doubt that if Trump was in the White House today, the US reactions towards his grabbing of Ukraine would have been very different. It may even be that the situation in Ukraine is prolonged and becomes a forever occupation. If Trump runs for election in the United States and wins, we will see all so a very different posture on the part of the United States towards Russians grabbing, invading Ukraine.

Get the reward center of your brain pumping by thinking about how sweet it will feel when you meet your goals. This shifts the focus onto you and your mission and makes your perpetrator irrelevant–which is exactly where they should be. A Happy Non-Revenge Ending It is easy to forget that early in Joe Biden’s presidency he made a bridge-building overture to Vladimir Putin. During the 2020 campaign, Biden barely mentioned Russia as a geopolitical rival to the US. China hogged all the attention. At the Geneva summit with his Russian counterpart in June 2021, the US president went to great lengths to massage Putin’s ego, even calling Russia a great power. At times this becomes a kind of ‘lament of the technocrat’. Naim, a former Venezuelan trade minister and editor of Foreign Policy magazine, asks ‘. ‘At a deeper, more troubling level, the question is why the followers continue to support populists even after there is overwhelming evidence that their promises are empty… [and they] are bent on concentrating power at the expense of their followers’ well-being?’ i.e. why have they stopped listening to us experts, dammit? You cannot deny the existence of important power holders, but those coexistence, those forces that fragmented power coexist with the forces that concentrate power, because what happened in this nine years is that those that saw power being challenged by newcomers, micro powers, new players that are using a different script were not going to take it standing just sitting down and watching how they lost their power, they reacted and that reaction is a subject of the book, The Revenge of Power. Another original book by an original thinker, offering a unique global perspective on populism and power." — Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer-prize winning historian and staff writer, The Atlantic

Naim describes how politics has devolved into pure spectacle and has now blurred the lines between entertainment and politics. Naim points to Berlusconi of Italy and Trump of the U.S. as examples of leaders who are more style than substance. The End of Power makes a truly important contribution, persuasively portraying a compelling dynamic of change cutting across multiple game-boards of the global power matrix." — Washington Post