New Thinking for a New World

Venezuela has been in a death spiral for years. The country have been devastated by political repression and economic depression; its people suffer from huger, malnutrition, shortages of food, medicine and, perhaps worst of all, opportunity. The numbers tell the story: 9 million malnourished, 90% of the country’s 28 million live in poverty, and more than 5 million have fled.

David Smolansky, our guest for this episode of New Thinking for a New World, is one of those who have fled. He was chased from his elected post of mayor of El Hatillo municipality and avoided jail only by seeking political asylum in the United States. Listen as he imagines how his country can—he believes, will—go from a failed, kleptocratic state to a prosperous democracy.

Q. What do Donald Trump and the Ayatollah Khamenei have in common with Rihanna?

Europe has had a bad few years. The struggles between North and South mostly over economics, between East and West mostly over values. Brexit, which shifted the locus of power eastward and distracted European leaders from any possibility of a more positive agenda. The pandemic, which among all its other impacts led to interrupted borders in a Europe that prided itself on having no borders. Tensions with the Americans, the Russians, the Chinese, and overall a sense that Europe is largely irrelevant to what happens elsewhere in the world.

2020 was an awful year for Iran. A year that started with the assassination of the country's widely popular, leading general ended with the assassination of its most important nuclear scientist. The three year old recession deepened while inflation soared. Widespread shortages, including medicines, made the fight against the pandemic all the more difficult. American “maximum pressure” combined with Iranian mismanagement took a huge toll on the country and on ordinary people. Yet, if anything, the regime seems more firmly in power today than a year or two ago.

How can that be? Will it change? Is there any chance that the Green Movement of a decade ago will reappear during this election year?

Answers are difficult to find, but this week’s New Thinking for a New World podcast guests are in the business of looking for them. Sima Shine leads the Iran program at Israel's prestigious Institute for National Security Studies and spent most of her career in the Israeli Intelligence Community. Dr. Sanam Vakil is deputy director of Chatham House's Middle East Africa Program, where she leads the Iran Forum among other projects.

Listen as they discuss Iran, today and tomorrow.

Even amid optimism about vaccines and declining infection rates, there is mounting evidence that the pandemic is generating a global mental health crisis. Lockdowns and social distancing reduce transmission, but have the unintended consequence of intensifying stress and anxiety, stretching social bonds, and weakening personal relationships. How do we cope with the results? Could rising levels of child abuse, spousal abuse, drug abuse, homicide and suicide leave even deeper marks than COVID itself? Do we need to think differently about mental health interventions?

Dr. Jonathan DePierro and Michael Niconchuk try to answer these questions in this week’s episode of New Thinking for a New World. DePierro is Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York and a practicing clinician; Niconchuk is a neuroscience researcher working in the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan among other places.

The pandemic has forced most of us to move from real life to virtual life—and we are mostly unhappy about the results. It’s not just that we miss the real thing, but that it's virtual alternative—endless hours on Zoom or Teams or some other platform—is such a pale imitation.

Are there different ways to use the tools? Since we may be stuck in this second best world for a while, can we find ways to make it better? Is there a cure for Zoom fatigue?

For answers, we turned to a magician. Magic used to be fundamentally physical, requiring a lot of interaction between the magician and his audience. Mark Mitton is a world class magician, whose performances produced Springsteen-like enthusiasm and engagement from those lucky enough to experience them. How did he move from three dimensions to two dimensions? What can he teach us about communicating during a pandemic?

Listen as host Alan Stoga explores how magical thinking (or, at least, a magician’s thinking) can help us through this crisis. And watch here for the queen of clubs.

This week we want to lift an older episode we believe bears repeating. What are some of the challenges Africa faces in its future? We invite you to take a moment and rediscover this episode from August 6th, 2020.

At least so far, what plagues Africa is less Covid-19, than its consequences: collapsed economies, an industrial world that is closing to Africa, a deceleration (if not reversal) in globalization, a new “Cold War” (this time between China and the West), severe climate change, and the urgent need to grow and develop faster to serve its young, demanding population.

How can Africa cope? Are solutions—or, at least, possibilities—to be found at the local, national or regional level? Where is the needed capital?

Looking for answers, Alan Stoga talks to Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, mayor of Sierra Leone’s capital Freetown, and Carole Wainaina, a leader of Africa50, a public, pan-African infrastructure bank.

We live at a time of pandemic, recession, growing doubts about the future and form of capitalism, challenges to democracy, shifts in global power. The response of many if not most organizations, public as well as private, is to hunker down and try to survive. But some are embracing the challenges and opportunities of profound change. That certainly describes the Robert Bosch Stiftung, one of Europe’s most important private philanthropies which works in areas ranging from health care to climate to migration and well beyond.

Under the leadership of Sandra Breka and others, the Foundation recently rethought, rebooted and relaunched its operations—surfing, rather than fleeing from the forces released by shifting tectonic plates. Listen as she discusses how they fared and what kind of world she and her colleagues hope to help shape.

One of America’s most revered founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin, allegedly used those words to describe what kind of political system the writers of the U.S. Constitution had created. The amazing events of recent weeks—Donald Trump’s concerted efforts to undo an electoral outcome that he didn’t like, the assault on the Capitol, and the impeachment of a President who is no longer in power—caused many Americans to remember Franklin’s concerns about the stability of their form of government.

Congressman Dick Gephardt, former Majority and Minority Leader in the House of Representatives, shares those worries. In this episode of New Thinking for a New World, he told host Alan Stoga, "I think we're as divided and in danger of losing the democracy as we were in 1860,” when the United States fought its civil war. Congressman Gephardt, a Democrat, firmly believes America needs bipartisanship to cope with the divisive spirits that are tearing at the country. Listen as he talks about some of the things that urgently need to be done, not just in the United States, but everywhere that democracy is under pressure.

If your sound isn’t perfect as you listen today, blame us not your speakers.

History is replete with leaders drawing real or metaphorical lines in the sand, challenging opponents to cross only if they dare. David Andelman, an American journalist and author, believes that one way to understand global risks and challenges is to explore the nexus of red lines that define global politics.

Indeed, Andelman—in this episode of New Thinking for a New World and in his recent book A Red Line in the Sand: Diplomacy, Strategy, and the History of Wars That Might Still Happen—argues that never before have global affairs been so entangled by red lines. Moreover, he says that Donald Trump made everything worse. Can we recover without a catastrophe?