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From the New York Times bestselling author of The End of Power
comes an edge-of-your-seat political thriller about rival spies,
dangerous love, and one of history's most devastating revolutions.
Venezuela, 1992. Unknown colonel Hugo Chavez stages an ill-fated
coup against a corrupt government, igniting the passions of
Venezuela's poor and catapulting the oil-rich country to
international attention. For two rival spies hurriedly dispatched
to Caracas-one from Washington, DC, and the other from Fidel
Castro's Cuba-this is a career-defining mission. Smooth-talking
Ivan Rincon of Cuba's Intelligence Directorate needs a rebel ally
to secure the future of his own country. His job: support Chavez
and the revolution by rallying the militants and neutralizing any
opposing agents. Meanwhile, the CIA's Cristina Garza will do
everything in her power to cut Chavez's influence short. Her
priority: stabilize the greatest oil reserves on the planet by
ferreting out and eliminating Cuba's principal operative. As Chavez
surges to power, Ivan and Cristina are caught in the fallout of a
toxic political time bomb: an intrepid female reporter and
unwitting informant, a drug lord and key architect in Chavez's
rise, and personal entanglements between the spies themselves. With
everything at stake, the adversaries find themselves at the center
of a game of espionage, seduction, murder, and shifting alliances
playing out against the precarious backdrop of a nation in free
fall. A thrilling fictional story based on unimaginable real-life
events.
Named one of the New Yorker's Best Books of 2022 "An authoritative
and intelligent portrait of the global spread of authoritarianism
and its dangers...what sets [this] work apart from books like
Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny and Michiko Kakutani's The Death of
Truth is its unusually comprehensive armada of facts about the
international drift over the past two decades toward authoritarian
leaders, whether old-style dictators like Kim Jong Un or nominally
elected presidents like Vladimir Putin." --Kirkus An urgent,
thrilling, and original look at the future of democracy that
illuminates one of the most important battles of our time: the
future of freedom and how to contain and defeat the autocrats
mushrooming around the world. In his bestselling book The End of
Power, Moises Naim examined power-diluting forces. In The Revenge
of Power, Naim turns to the trends, conditions, technologies and
behaviors that are contributing to the concentration of power, and
to the clash between those forces that weaken power and those that
strengthen it. He concentrates on the three "P"s--populism,
polarization, and post-truths. All of which are as old as time, but
are combined by today's autocrats to undermine democratic life in
new and frightening ways. Power has not changed. But the way people
go about gaining it and using it has been transformed. The Revenge
of Power is packed with alluring characters, riveting stories about
power grabs and losses, and vivid examples of the tricks and
tactics used by autocrats to counter the forces that are weakening
their power. It connects the dots between global events and
political tactics that, when taken together, show a profound and
often stealthy transformation in power and politics worldwide.
Using the best available data and insights taken from recent
research in the social sciences, Naim reveals how, on close
examination, the same set of strategies to consolidate power pop up
again and again in places with vastly different political,
economic, and social circumstances, and offers insights about what
can be done to ensure that freedom and democracy prevail. The
outcomes of these battles for power will determine if our future
will be more autocratic or more democratic. Naim addresses the
questions at the heart of the matter: Why is power concentrating in
some places while in others it is fragmenting and degrading? And
the big question: What is the future of freedom?
We know that power is shifting: From West to East and North to South, from presidential palaces to public squares, from once formidable corporate behemoths to nimble startups and, slowly but surely, from men to women. But power is not merely shifting and dispersing. It is also decaying. Those in power today are more constrained in what they can do with it and more at risk of losing it than ever before. In The End of Power, award-winning columnist and former Foreign Policy editor Moises Naim illuminates the struggle between once-dominant megaplayers and the new micropowers challenging them in every field of human endeavor.
Drawing on provocative, original research, Naim shows how the antiestablishment drive of micropowers can topple tyrants, dislodge monopolies, and open remarkable new opportunities, but it can also lead to chaos and paralysis. Naim deftly covers the seismic changes underway in business, religion, education, within families, and in all matters of war and peace. Examples abound in all walks of life: In 1977, eighty-nine countries were ruled by autocrats while today more than half the world's population lives in democracies. CEO's are more constrained and have shorter tenures than their predecessors. Modern tools of war, cheaper and more accessible, make it possible for groups like Hezbollah to afford their own drones. In the second half of 2010, the top ten hedge funds earned more than the world's largest six banks combined. Those in power retain it by erecting powerful barriers to keep challengers at bay.
Today, insurgent forces dismantle those barriers more quickly and easily than ever, only to find that they themselves become vulnerable in the process.
Accessible and captivating, Naim offers a revolutionary look at the inevitable end of power--and how it will change your world.
Political and economic reform is at the top of national agendas
around the world. This book based on Moises Naim's participation in
the Venezuelan reform experience and as executive director at the
World Bank raises questions and explores problems crucial to
achieving national reform strategies. Naims lucid analysis grapples
with the problems of dealing with entrenched interests bent on
derailing reform; allaying the corrosive effects of corruption and
public outcry over inequitable burdens; coping with the political
instability brought on by decimated public institutions; managing
the impact of reforms on the military establishment; and mobilizing
public support for measures as essential as they are painful. The
heady days of revolution are gone and these and other dilemmas now
confront besieged reform governments everywhere. The problem of
managing these in the real world is the subject this book tackles.
In late December 1994--after having attracted widespread praise as
a model of economic reform and becoming a super-magnet for
international investors, as well as the United States partner in
the newly consummated NAFTA trade agreement--Mexico seemingly
overnight plunged into political and economic crisis. The perceived
threat to the global economy was to lead the Clinton
administration, against strong congressional criticism, to push
through an unprecedented $40-billion international rescue package.
What went wrong in Mexico? What role was played by flaws in the
design of the Mexican reforms, by political as well as economic
decision-making in the context of the crises that shook the
country, by external market forces, and by sheer bad luck? What
lessons can the peso crisis offer to those grappling with newly
unfolding crises in other emerging-market economies around the
world? The complex anatomy of this 'first economic crisis of the
21st century' is here examined-in sometimes sharply divergent
perspectives--by a distinguished international group that includes
ex-ministers, financial market participants, leading political
scientists and economists, and senior officials from the World
Bank, the IMF, and the Inter-American Development Bank. In addition
to the editors, the contributors are Robert L. Bartley, Nancy
Birdsall, Agustino Carstens, Rudiger Dornbusch, Denise Dresser,
Jeffry A. Frieden, Michael Gavin, Francisco Gil-Diaz, David D.
Hale, Ricardo Hausmann, Claudio M. Loser, and Peter H. Smith.
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