“More frequent elections, more referenda, more scrutiny, and more contenders,” he predicts. Naim sees more ineffectual governance and turbulence in the future. This new era of political instability creates seemingly insurmountable obstacles to consensus, as weakened leaders on both sides of the aisle, unable to impose their will, consistently fail to avert a relentless series of fiscal and budgetary showdowns, among other areas of consequential disagreement. “Previously, in the five elections from 1996 to 2004, the biggest gain in House seats by any one party was nine in 2006, the Republicans lost thirty seats and in 2008 the Democrats won twenty-one, and in 2010 the Democrats lost sixty-three.” “Voters gave the Republicans control of both Congress and the White House in 20 and then took it away from them in 20 - only to restore control of the House of Representatives to them in 2010,” he reminds us. In the political arena, he sees power progressively declining in national governments and among political parties around the world, no more so than in Washington, where he is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Wherever Naim trains his eye along the global horizon, he observes a discernible erosion of power. Understanding how power is losing its value - and facing up to the hard challenges this poses - is the key to making sense of one of the most important trends reshaping the world in the twenty-first century.” Their fierceness masks the increasingly evanescent nature of power itself. “From boardrooms and combat zones to cyberspace, battles for power are as intense as ever, but they are yielding diminishing returns. “Power is undergoing a far more fundamental mutation that has not been sufficiently recognized and understood.” Naim renders an original and ultimately well-substantiated conclusion: “Power is decaying,” he insists. Over time, Naim arrived at an arresting and provocative thesis, captured in his analytically sophisticated new work, “The End of Power.” The observation that “power is shifting from one continent or country to another, or that it is dispersing among many new players, is not enough,” he asserts. A frequent speaker at elite gatherings from Davos to Bilderberg to Sun Valley, Naim exerts the sort of intellectual influence that shapes opinion among the powerful in the worlds of government, finance and media. He has been a professor of economics, a prolific columnist, an author of multiple books on international affairs and an editor of Foreign Policy magazine.

At the precocious age of 36, he was appointed Venezuela’s minister of trade and industry and subsequently served as a director of Venezuela’s Central Bank and executive director of the World Bank. Over the course of his protean career, Moises Naim has oscillated between being a student and practitioner of power.

The End of Power by Moisés Naím