Foreign Policy presents a unique portrait of 2010's global marketplace of ideas and the thinkers who make them.
1. Warren Buffett and Bill Gates
for stepping up as the world's states falter.
Chairman, Berkshire Hathaway | Omaha, Neb.
Co-chair, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation | Seattle
If you were one of the 1,011 billionaires in the world, what would you do with all that money? Famed investor Warren Buffett (net worth: an estimated $47 billion) and Microsoft founder Bill Gates ($54 billion) have an idea: Give at least half of it away.
The two billionaires have been traveling the world -- first to China and soon to India, as well as around the United States -- on a mission to create a global club of "Great Givers" who will transform philanthropy from a pastime of the wealthy into a calling for everyone who is rich. Since 2006, when Buffett pledged to give 99 percent of his assets away to charity -- much of it to Gates's foundation, which spends more than $2 billion yearly on programs to improve public health and development -- the two have emerged as an unlikely and formidable pairing of wealthy evangelists, preaching a breathtakingly ambitious new gospel of how capitalist riches can solve global problems. That became clear this year when Gates joined up with Buffett's project to convince the wealthiest elite from Silicon Valley to Shanghai to donate half their wealth, a challenge that, if answered by all America's billionaires, let alone the world's, could bring an estimated $600 billion to needy and deserving causes. So far, 40 billionaires have signed up.
As the world has lost confidence in the ability of countries and institutions like the United Nations to solve global problems, Gates offers an attractive alternative vision: that the business community's relentless drive to innovate can help with our biggest challenges, from malaria to food scarcity to illiteracy. And he has the money to prove it. At a recent conference on HIV/AIDS, Gates pledged more than the government of either Norway or Australia, and almost as much as the entire European Commission. His foundation's funding for research into microbicides -- gels that would prevent HIV transmission -- helped lead to the first real breakthrough this July, when a candidate gel showed 39 percent effectiveness. Whether it's a green revolution for Africa or a vaccine for malaria, Gates's agenda is now the global agenda -- and he and Buffett won't stop until they see it through.
2. Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Robert Zoellick
for steely vision at a moment of crisis.
IMF managing director | Washington
World Bank president | Washington
The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are the globe's firefighters -- taken for granted until they're desperately needed, as they are now. And their leaders have also done an especially good job explaining how those conflagrations might be prevented next time around.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn's IMF has managed to forestall sovereign defaults in Greece, Hungary, Pakistan, and Ukraine without inspiring much resistance -- in striking contrast to the near-uprisings that accompanied IMF programs during the late 1990s Asian financial crisis. Strauss-Kahn also put his stamp on geopolitics this year, convincing the Germans to step up during Greece's crisis and later working to forestall an international currency war.
As head of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick has stepped into the chaotic aftermath of a harrowing array of unexpected disasters, from the floods in Pakistan to the earthquake in Haiti to the continuing global food crisis, while establishing the bank as a leader in thinking about global trends from combating climate change to democratizing Internet technology.
Both institutions have been especially attuned to the rise of emerging economies. Strauss-Kahn has overseen the redistribution of the IMF's powerful board seats from developed countries to rising powers. And in April, Zoellick bluntly declared the era of the "Third World" over. Countries like Brazil, China, India, and South Africa aren't developing countries anymore; they're independent "
poles of growth." Without Strauss-Kahn and Zoellick at the helm, we might not be using the word "growth" at all.
3. Barack Obama
for charting a course through criticism.
President | Washington
Don't count Barack Obama out. Sure, the brainy young American president has had a tough sophomore year, with a stubbornly sluggish economy, worsening conditions in Afghanistan, an electoral backlash at home, and the surprise challenge of more than 4 million barrels of oil leaking into the Gulf of Mexico. His sweeping plans to overhaul immigration and reinvent the way Americans use energy never got off the ground, and he can boast of neither Middle East peace nor mastery over the restive Republicans at home rising up against what they bemoan as the advent of European-style socialism.
But Obama is still arguably the developed world's most popular leader, even if the American public judges him more harshly, and he is slowly but surely inventing a new kind of U.S. leadership to go along with his vision of an America that once again projects its power through the force of its ideas. To Obama has fallen a tough task: the hard work that accompanies the building of a new order to succeed America's unchallenged rule as the lone post-Cold War superpower. But luckily for the world it is a task Obama embraces, if still hesitantly at times. He has put American prestige on the line to speak up for emerging powers still not properly represented in the world's governing bodies, boldly renewed U.S. ties of friendship with the democracies of Asia, and in his ringing address to the U.N. General Assembly in September declared himself ready to "call out those who suppress ideas" and "serve as a voice for those who are voiceless."
Such idealism has not yet come to define Obama's legacy in the world; for all his Wilsonian rhetoric, he remains a cautious incrementalist on most issues. In many ways, he's the most realist of recent U.S. presidents, determined to focus on the terrible challenges, from Afghanistan to climate change, that he's been dealt. The world may yet thank him for it.
4. Zhou Xiaochuan
for holding the world's economic fate in his hands.
Governor, People's Bank | China
This August, Internet rumors that Chinese central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan had defected sent portfolio managers and currency traders the world over scrambling for cover. Although the rumors were later proved false, they still revealed just how important Zhou has become to global economic stability.
It wasn't the first time Zhou has made waves on his way to becoming the most visible international symbol of China's new assertiveness. Last year, he roiled markets by proposing a new international reserve currency to replace the U.S. dollar. This year, he hasn't stopped pressing Washington to recognize that the era when it could dictate the rules of the global economic order is over. Zhou's case was bolstered this August when China surpassed Japan to become the world's second-largest economy, a long-awaited milestone that immediately set market-watchers pondering how long until China takes the top spot from the United States.
Batting away demands that China allow its currency to appreciate, Zhou recently described yuan revaluation as a
Western-style fantasy cure, "pills that solve your problem overnight," as opposed to what's needed: a proper Chinese-style treatment of "10 herbs put together … that solve the problem not overnight, but maybe in one month or two months." It's the kind of line you can get away with when you're sitting on $2.65 trillion in international currency reserves.
5. Ben Bernanke
for owning the U.S. economy, no matter what it takes.
Chairman, Federal Reserve | Washington
Last year's
No. 1 FP Global Thinker might not have dreamed that 2010 could possibly be tougher than 2009. But even after the passage of historic financial regulatory reforms in July that gave the Fed unprecedented power, not to mention his work over the past two years steering the U.S. economy through its worst downturn since the Great Depression, Ben Bernanke still found himself taking shots from lawmakers and pundits alike. An upswing of populist anger, fury over politically difficult moves like the 2009 AIG bailout, and the interminable beat of bad job numbers have kept the Fed chairman in the foxhole.
But he has not given up. This year, he has raised the Fed's balance sheet to a cool $2.3 trillion (from $850 billion before the crisis), shooting tens of billions of that over to the Treasury to help close the deficit, and pursued the controversial idea of quantitative easing, a high-powered stimulant. The morning after the Republican gains in the midterm elections suggested Congress would be gridlocked for years to come, he took the aggressive, risky step of announcing that the Fed would pump an additional $600 billion into the financial system by 2011, raising the bank's holdings to nearly $3 trillion and, ideally, lowering mortgage prices and the unemployment rate in a way the rest of the government may no longer have the tools to do. Although Bernanke
recently admitted that "central bankers alone cannot solve the world's economic problems," his bold moves leave no doubt about who's in charge.
6. Celso Amorim
for transforming Brazil into a global player.
Foreign minister | Brazil
Celso Amorim wouldn't crack a smile at the old canard that Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be. The wily and urbane Brazilian diplomat, finishing off his second term as foreign minister, has done his utmost to make his country an international powerhouse -- right now.
Neither reflexively opposing the United States in the style of Latin America's old left nor slavishly following its lead, Amorim has charted an independent course. He has criticized developed countries as hypocritical and advocated that developing countries take a leading role in combating climate change. This year, he teamed with an unlikely partner, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu (
No. 7), to cut an eleventh-hour deal designed to dial down the international tension over Iran's nuclear program. Although the initiative succeeded mostly in setting teeth on edge in Western capitals, it also put Brazil on the map.
Under Amorim's guidance, Brazil has enthusiastically embraced the BRIC alliance with Russia, India, and China, which he thinks has the power to "
redefine world governance." Brazil aspires to a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council; in the meantime, it has built up its diplomatic corps and boosted its contribution to international peacekeeping missions in places like Haiti. Amorim's tenure under Brazil's larger-than-life retiring president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has proved that it is possible to have, as he recently
put it, "a humanist foreign policy, without losing sight of the national interest."
7. Ahmet Davutoglu
for being the brains behind Turkey's global reawakening.
Foreign minister | Turkey
Ahmet Davutoglu rose to prominence in Turkish academic circles as an advocate for what he called "strategic depth": Turkey, he argued, should use its geographic position and identity as a secular Muslim democracy to build bridges between Europe, the Caucasus, and the Middle East. Over the last seven years, Davutoglu has brought his theories out of the classroom and onto the international stage -- with some impressive results.
Davutoglu's diplomats have worked to reconcile Iraq's fractious political groups and plan a pipeline that will link the oil fields of the Caucasus and the Arab world with Europe. His ambitious "zero problems with neighbors" policy has attempted to boost Turkey's relations with everyone in the region simultaneously, a task much easier set than accomplished.
Ankara's new independence has raised some eyebrows. After an Israeli raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla left nine Turks dead this summer, Davutoglu said the attack was "
like 9/11 for Turkey." Turkey's warm relationship with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has also raised fears that the country is drifting away from the West at a time when its long-held aspiration to join the European Union appears hopelessly stalled.
Still, the foreign minister seems undaunted. "The world expects great things from Turkey," he wrote in an
essay for
Foreign Policy. Under his watch, Turkey has assumed an international role not matched since a sultan sat in Istanbul's Topkapi Palace.
8. David Petraeus
for taking a demotion to save a war.
Commanding U.S. general | Afghanistan
George W. Bush and Barack Obama may have their differences, but both turned to the same man when they needed to salvage a war: Gen. David Petraeus, the man who literally
wrote the book on how the United States should undertake counterinsurgency. Now, the world is waiting with bated breath to see whether Petraeus's strategy of civilian-centered security, which allowed the United States to achieve a relatively orderly end of combat operations in Iraq, can work in Afghanistan.
Petraeus has already used his new position and his incredible stature -- he has won the public's trust like no other battlefield general since Dwight D. Eisenhower -- to wield influence from Washington to Kabul. After agreeing to trade down from Centcom to the lower-ranking job in Afghanistan when Obama cashiered Gen. Stanley McChrystal, Petraeus quickly issued new rules governing the use of force by U.S. soldiers and seems to have dissuaded a Florida pastor from burning the Quran by arguing that it would endanger the lives of U.S. troops. In an echo of his success in co-opting Sunni insurgents in Iraq, he also convinced Afghan President Hamid Karzai to accept the creation of local anti-Taliban Afghan militias.
One person he hasn't entirely co-opted, however, is the U.S. president; the general has all but tattooed on his forehead his skepticism about Obama's July 2011 withdrawal timeline. In a sign of the immense credibility Petraeus enjoys, it is by no means clear which viewpoint would prevail in the battle for public opinion.
9. Robert Gates
for transforming U.S. military might for the 21st century.
Defense secretary | Washington
Robert Gates isn't the first strategist to dwell on the need for the U.S. military to adapt to fight the low-intensity conflicts of the present and future -- he's just the most successful. While his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, talked about trimming the military's expensive pet projects, Gates actually delivered: The career intelligence officer has so far convinced the military brass and Congress to cut 31 programs, saving an estimated $330 billion. At the same time, Gates, a lifelong Republican, has become a close advisor to President Barack Obama and enlisted him in a project he defines with breathtaking ambition: reimagining how American power will be wielded in the 21st century. With the United States alone still accounting for an astonishing 44 percent of the world's military expenditures while facing a new age of austerity, it's not just a big idea; it's an urgent necessity.
But it's hardly Gates's sole brief. Few defense secretaries have had the misfortune of presiding over two failing wars at once, but Gates has managed Iraq and Afghanistan with low-key aplomb even as he has seen not one but two successive Afghan commanders fired. When Obama sat down last fall to make the biggest decision of his presidency -- whether to throw tens of thousands of additional U.S. troops into the deteriorating Afghan war -- Gates, who had helped fund the anti-Soviet jihad as a top CIA official in the 1980s, emerged as a
center of gravity, by all accounts, in the ensuing debate. Having seen one Vietnam unfold, he's not anxious to experience another one.
10. Angela Merkel
for leading Europe through the recession with Teutonic resolve.
Chancellor | Germany
In the throes of the financial crisis, when most political leaders were reaching for their copies of Keynes, Angela Merkel was partial to citing a less likely source of wisdom: The famously penny-pinching "Swabian housewife is the model for the world economy," Merkel said in an unsubtle dig at credit-addicted Americans. So when Greece suggested this year that it might need help paying its bills, Merkel wasn't inclined to reach into her pocket.
Merkel's steeliness is tempered by pragmatism, though: Eventually, she conceded that a bailout of Europe's indebted countries was necessary, but made sure that the final trillion-dollar solution was organized at least partly around German principles.
Merkel has taken the same tough approach at home. After conceding the need for stimulus measures in 2008 and 2009, she insisted this year on making progress toward a balanced national budget. Judging from the results, Merkel's frugality seems to have fared well against orthodox deficit spending: Germany enjoyed record growth in the second quarter of 2010, and its unemployment rate is now at its lowest since 1992. Keynes may have some lessons to learn after all from the German hausfrau.
11. Michael Bloomberg and Feisal Abdul Rauf
for reminding a divided country that Muslims are Americans too.
Mayor | New York
Imam, Cordoba Initiative | New York
The Jewish mayor of New York City, who ranks as the 10th-wealthiest man in the United States, and the Kuwaiti-born imam, who had previously worked as an industrial-filter salesman, might seem an odd pair. But after Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf's plans to construct a 15-story Islamic cultural center two blocks from the site of the World Trade Center stirred outrage in the United States, he found a staunch ally in Michael Bloomberg.
Bloomberg told New Yorkers that the right to construct the center, dubbed the "Ground Zero mosque" by its opponents, was just the sort of religious freedom that was attacked by terrorists on 9/11. "Political controversies come and go, but our values and our traditions endure -- and there is no neighborhood in this city that is off-limits to God's love and mercy,"
said the mayor.
Rauf's critics damn him as a closet Islamist or dismiss him as a salesman whose ambition exceeds his influence. But since 9/11, the imam has made an indisputable contribution to interreligious understanding: He delivered a moving eulogy at the funeral of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter murdered by al Qaeda, and continues to work with the U.S. State Department to spread a democratic, pluralistic version of Islam across the globe.
"For many years people have asked, 'Where are the moderate Muslims?'"
Rauf mused recently. "But we moderates couldn't get any attention. Now that we've gotten attention, I'm accused of being immoderate!"
12. Nouriel Roubini
for seeing the roots of the next crisis in the current one.
Economist | New York
Being a global economic Cassandra isn't a cheerful job, but someone's got to do it -- and Nouriel Roubini acknowledges that he fits the role perfectly. He has even embraced the moniker "
Dr. Doom," a name derisively pinned on him before the 2008 crash that showed his pessimism was warranted. And so while everyone's still trying to figure out how to overcome the last financial crisis, Roubini has his sights set firmly on the next one -- which, Dr. Doom assures us in his book,
Crisis Economics, won't latest be too far off.
Roubini argues that the United States is at serious risk of heading back into a recession, and unlike other talking heads, he puts a number on his prediction, saying there's a 40 percent chance of the United States hitting the dreaded "double dip." Why? He thinks the root causes of the current malaise have only been covered over and that unhealthy levels of debt are once again piling up around the world -- though this time on government accounting ledgers. It's only a matter of time, he says, until we start seeing national bankruptcies -- perhaps even a cascade of them across Europe that sparks the dissolution of the euro. If Roubini has one message, it's that crises aren't unforeseeable "
black swan" events, but "white swans" -- the culmination of long trends that are perfectly intelligible to anyone who takes the time to examine the data. We may not like Dr. Doom's advice, but we can't say he didn't warn us.
13. Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton
for proving that you don't need to be president to act presidential.
Former president | New York
Secretary of State | Washington
Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations in September, Hillary Rodham Clinton sounded a
confident note: "After years of war and uncertainty, people are wondering what the future holds, at home and abroad. So let me say it clearly: The United States can, must, and will lead in this new century."
Ironically, two of the people most crucial to the new global century are the Clintons themselves: the ex-president and the ex-would-be-president, the power couple now defined by their position just outside the highest reaches of power. Except that, these days, both Clintons are more influential, and more beloved, than ever. Bill's Clinton Global Initiative is starting to feel like a sexier, more effective competitor not just to Davos but to the United Nations itself, bringing world leaders together to commit their resources to fighting poverty with market-based, technocratic solutions. As of this summer, his foundation had contributed $23 million and countless man-hours to the effort to rebuild Haiti. Polls have shown he's a better advocate for Democratic candidates than the actual president, and he spent most of the fall stumping for woebegone Dems from Orlando to Seattle.
Meanwhile, Hillary showed up in one recent poll as the most popular political figure in the United States, an accolade she has earned through a no-drama approach to an array of thankless tasks: brushing off Vladimir Putin's temper tantrum to reach agreement on nuclear disarmament and Iran sanctions, promoting women's rights over the objections of entrenched traditionalists, and launching an innovative effort to bring clean cookstoves to the world's poorest. But what she has mainly stood for is American competence, with her Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review a major, if unglamorous step toward making U.S. statesmanship a more agile beast. If this is what Clinton nostalgia looks like, bring it on.
14. Steven Chu
for his dogged efforts to keep America innovating.
Energy secretary | Washington
It was supposed to be the year of climate change, when Congress and the White House would finally act to stave off the worst calamities of global warming. It's perhaps an understatement to say that 2010 was not that year. Last December's much-touted global talks in Copenhagen ended in bewilderment, energy legislation fizzled out, a ruptured oil well poured millions of gallons into the Gulf of Mexico, and meanwhile, we lived through one of the hottest years on record.
But there was one bright spot: America's energy secretary, the indomitable Steven Chu, who was able to start using the $39 billion Recovery Act windfall for clean-energy investments. Checkbook in hand, the Nobel-winning physicist made an unpopular but, he argued, necessary push for building nuclear power plants, while his department helped fund 30 new electric-car projects, issued $15.9 billion in loan guarantees for clean-energy innovation, supported new experiments with grid-storage solutions, and installed a new mad-scientist subagency meant to support high-risk, high-reward research. In a February interview, Chu sounded a determined note: "One can get discouraged and give up. Let's just say I'm here because I think we can do this."
15. George Soros
for proving it's not what you make that counts -- it's who you give it to.
Philanthropist | New York
The name George Soros is practically synonymous with philanthropy; the Hungarian-born investor has already donated more than $7 billion of his fortune to charitable causes. But his announcement in September that he was bequeathing
$100 million to Human Rights Watch turned heads. It was the largest gift Soros has ever made to a human rights group -- and the largest a human rights group has ever received. The gift is meant to transform Human Rights Watch into an organization that is "genuinely international in scope," as Soros put it. The big idea? That "America has
lost the moral high ground for promoting human rights," and it's time to bring the rest of the world into the discussion.
That idea certainly fits with Soros's previous charitable work, much of it through his Open Society Foundations, which promote transparency and citizen empowerment in newly democratic and nondemocratic countries. Soros also plays a hugely important role as a public intellectual on his own turf: the global economy. Most recently, he has warned of a bubble in the gold market, predicted a long road to recovery for the U.S. economy, and been absolutely stinging in his critique of the euro. The currency, he wrote in the
New York Review of Books, is "
a patently flawed construct" with one central bank and a dozen treasuries. If Europe isn't already taking notes, it should be.
16. Liu Xiaobo
for bearing the flame of 1989 into a new generation.
Political prisoner | China
When Liu Xiaobo learned of his 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, he wept and told his wife -- who was visiting him in remote Jinzhou prison, where the dissident writer has been serving an 11-year sentence -- that he was dedicating the award to "
the lost souls" of Tiananmen Square, whose protest back in 1989 turned the soft-spoken professor into a political activist.
Liu had agreed to help write
Charter 08, a manifesto for Chinese civil rights modeled on the Soviet-era Charter 77, in a similar act of selflessness, knowing it would get him in trouble. Two days before its publication, on Dec. 8, 2008, he was detained and thrown into a windowless cell. A year later he was convicted of "incitement to subvert state power."
It wasn't the first time Liu had been jailed; his first confinement followed his participation in the Tiananmen demonstrations. Yet more than two decades of suffering have not broken his spirit or blurred his convictions. "To block freedom of speech is to trample on human rights, to strangle humanity, and to suppress the truth,"
Liu told the court before his sentencing.
China's state media have characterized the Nobel only as a tool of Western propagandists, and live feeds of CNN and the BBC went black during the prize's announcement. But the word is getting out, and it's not just the Nobel Peace Prize committee that thinks China will eventually have to reckon with Liu's ideas.
17. Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs
for reinventing reading.
CEO, Amazon | Seattle
CEO, Apple | Cupertino, Calif.
Amazon's Kindle, the e-reader that Jeff Bezos's online retail juggernaut has sold since 2007, is not particularly arresting as far as electronic fetish objects go, a monochromatic plastic slab with all the charisma of a graphing calculator. But on the strength of the gadget's popularity, Bezos believes, his company will be selling more e-books than paperbacks by sometime next year. "It stuns me," Bezos told
USA Today in July. "People forget that Kindle is only 33 months old."
As e-readers go global, it is an open question whether the future of reading belongs to the calculatedly distraction-free Kindle or its most formidable competition, the touch-screen-operated, hypernetworked iPad that Steve Jobs's Apple debuted to much fanfare this year. But with their promised ease of moving digitized words regardless of national borders, either device is sure to be transformative. Think of what a few Kindles could mean for a school in sub-Saharan Africa, where an entire classroom's worth of students often have to share a single textbook -- or for the corners of the world where ink-and-paper books are still considered dangerous technology. In countries such as Egypt, where even
One Thousand and One Nights is regularly banned from brick-and-mortar bookstores, will the Kindle be a crucial breakthrough for free speech? Or will the digital fingerprints left by e-browsers simply give government censors one more surveillance tool? For now, it's a story without an ending.
18. Shivshankar Menon
for dragging India out of its global nonalignment.
National security advisor | India
India famously clung to its aloof foreign policy for years after the end of the Cold War rendered meaningless the concept of nonalignment that it had long embraced. A career diplomat who is now national security advisor, Shivshankar Menon has helped break New Delhi of this habit, drawing India closer to the West.
Menon was a key player in negotiating a civilian nuclear deal with the United States, which cemented India's cooperation on nonproliferation issues with the international community. Today, as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's foreign-policy guru, he is building on that breakthrough to expand U.S.-India ties on a wide array of issues, including efforts to fight the global economic recession. In a recent visit to Washington, he reminded his audience that U.S. exports to India have grown faster over the last five years than those to any other major trading partner.
Menon has also embraced the NATO-led coalition's effort in Afghanistan, saying that India's goals are "consistent" with U.S. aims. India has invested more than $1 billion in reconstruction aid for Afghanistan, to the dismay of its rival, Pakistan.
But Menon, who is fluent in Chinese and German, has done more than tie his country's fate to that of the United States -- he has encouraged Indians to embrace a newly active role in world affairs. After all,
he explains, "Our needs from the world have changed, as has our capability."
19. Ron Paul
for inspiring the thinking man's Tea Party.
Congressman | Washington
He may not have won a single primary, but nobody in the 2008 U.S. presidential race presaged Obama-era conservative politics quite as well as Ron Paul. With his stridently libertarian policy goals -- abolishing the Federal Reserve, withdrawing from the United Nations and NATO -- and his plain-spoken eccentricity, the obstetrician-turned-Texas-congressman often seemed more like a third-party candidate than a Republican. But in the past two years, Republican politics have lurched decidedly in Paul's direction. The amorphous but passionate Tea Party movement espouses a similar vision of a radically smaller federal state. If Sarah Palin's devoted followers are drawn by her personality, Paul's are drawn by his ideas: strict constitutionalism, doubts about U.S. interventionism abroad, and a conviction to reduce the size of government at any cost. Paul's chances in 2012 may be vanishingly small, but polls show half of Tea Partiers agreeing with his views. "We're bankrupting this country, and we … need a sea change," he told a cheering crowd of Tax Day protesters in April. With Tea Party fervor fueling Republican gains in Congress this year and helping bring Paul's son Rand to the Senate, the sea change might be finally hitting shore.
20. Mohamed ElBaradei
for proving that there are second acts in public life.
Democracy activist | Egypt
No one could accuse this Nobel Peace Prize laureate of taking the easy jobs. During his 12-year stint as director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohamed ElBaradei took on some of the world's worst nuclear proliferators -- not to mention U.S. President George W. Bush, who resented the Egyptian lawyer's unwillingness to ratchet up pressure on Iran.
But after leaving the IAEA in 2009, ElBaradei gave himself an even more challenging task: bringing democracy to Egypt. In doing so, he has put himself on a collision course with gerontocratic President Hosni Mubarak, the 82-year-old ruler of Egypt for the past three decades.
Mubarak has found his leading critic a hard man to discredit. ElBaradei has organized a political front meant to unite Egypt's opposition and launched an eloquent attack on an Egyptian political system rigged to ensure the Mubarak family's continued hold on power. He recently called for a boycott of November's parliamentary elections, arguing that participating would only lend credibility to a regime on its last legs.
"I see a decaying temple, almost collapsing,"
ElBaradei says of Mubarak's rule. "It will fall sooner rather than later."
21. Sergey Brin and Larry Page
for standing up to China's bullying.
Co-founders, Google | Mountain View, Calif.
Sergey Brin and Larry Page, presidents of a global search giant valued at $196 billion, have assigned themselves a
mission no smaller than "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." The scale and diversity of Google's ambitions would be laughable if the company weren't already so far along in accomplishing them. Through its philanthropic arm, Google has also spent $100 million since 2004 on everything from wind-power ventures to public health.
But the world's greatest answer provider has also raised plenty of questions. Blithely certain of its own virtuousness -- its motto, famously, is "
Don't be evil" -- the company has stumbled into controversy with its apparent disregard for privacy and its recent support for multitiered access to the Internet. At the same time, however, the company has grown into its responsibilities as a global player. After years of obliging China's sprawling censorship regime, Google in 2010 forced a showdown with the country -- reportedly at the behest of Brin, whose family escaped Soviet Russia when he was a child. ("It has definitely shaped my views, and some of my company's views,"
he told the
New York Times.) Google then devised a clever workaround -- routing Chinese search requests to servers in Hong Kong -- that allowed Chinese officials to save face while easing restrictions for the country's citizens. For a company renowned for digital intelligence, it was an impressive display of the human kind.
22. Christine Lagarde
for pushing France on fiscal discipline.
Finance minister | France
In a year when austerity ruled, one woman managed to imbue an extremely unpopular set of policies with moral authority and intellectual heft: Christine Lagarde, President Nicolas Sarkozy's finance minister and the architect of France's response to the economic crisis. Lagarde, former head of the global law firm Baker & McKenzie, has been known in Paris as a deficit hawk and pro-growth capitalist for some time, earning her the unflattering-for-France nickname, "The American." In 2010, she played a key behind-the-scenes role in the Greek bailout, while bucking popular opinion in France with her plans to slash spending, raise the retirement age to 62, increase taxes for the highest earners, and shrink the government by 100,000 civil-service jobs. By September, she could boast of falling deficits and a projected growth rate of 2 percent for 2011. "We are in the middle of the beginning of the end,"
she said in July. "The crisis has really hit its peak."
Lagarde may not have been the most popular member of Sarkozy's cabinet this year, as rioters raged over her proposed measures, but she was certainly the most essential. Her goal entering office was to bully France into, as she put it in 2007, rolling up its sleeves and getting over its age-old antipathy toward work. The crisis has offered a petri dish to explore the impact of her ideas, and so far the experiment seems to be working.
23. Salam Fayyad
for bringing faith in technocracy to the Holy Land.
Prime minister | Palestine
It may just be a soft-spoken technocrat who makes the revolutionary dream of an independent Palestine into a reality. Last year, Salam Fayyad, a former IMF hand, laid out a plan to construct the institutions of a Palestinian state in two years. In 2010, his push is gaining momentum: Fayyad has opened dozens of schools and housing centers across the West Bank and pledged that at least half of the Palestinian Authority's budget this year will be provided by tax revenues rather than aid. The West Bank's economy grew at an impressive 7 percent clip during 2009, while Palestinian security services cracked down on attacks meant to destabilize the peace process.
In his three years in office, Fayyad has evolved from a bureaucrat's bureaucrat into a political figure in his own right. At the same time, he remains the West Bank leader most willing to work with his Israeli counterparts, who often praise him as a "Palestinian Ben-Gurion."
Increasingly, Westerners and Arabs alike see Fayyad's state-building plan as the most effective way to place the initiative back in Palestinian hands. And even if the latest round of Mideast peace talks comes to naught, Palestinians will still have the new schools, improved roads, and professional law enforcement agencies that are Fayyad's legacy.
24. Elizabeth Warren
for putting the spotlight on America's debt binge.
White House advisor | Washington
In November 2008, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid handed Elizabeth Warren one of the most difficult assignments in Washington: leading an audit of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the $700 billion bank bailout approved the previous month to stem the 2008 global financial panic. The role would have made Warren persona non grata on Wall Street, if she hadn't been already: The plain-spoken Oklahoman bankruptcy expert had already been banging the drum for the creation of an agency that would oversee financial products -- including the exotic instruments that had precipitated the crash -- in the same way that existing federal agencies monitor the safety of pharmaceuticals, food, and home electronics. "The time has come to put scaremongering to rest and to recognize that regulation can often support and advance efficient and more dynamic markets,"
she wrote in
Democracy in 2007.
Now tasked with overseeing the creation of the agency she envisioned -- which was passed by Congress in July -- her target remains largely the same: the predatory financial activities that bankrupt underinformed and low-income consumers. "A model that is designed to keep those families in a revolving door of debt,"
she said, "is not good for families -- and ultimately not good for the economy," neither America's nor the world's.
25. Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn, William Perry, and George Shultz
for showing that if wise men can give up on nukes, so can the rest of us.
Elder statesmen | New York, Washington, Palo Alto, Calif.
No one understands the danger of nuclear war quite like this quartet, who cut their teeth as Cold War hawks. Their transformation from hard-liners to anti-nuke activists has been critical this year as Barack Obama has sought to win approval of a new strategic arms treaty with Russia and inch closer to a world without nuclear weapons.
Through timely op-eds and cameos in the acclaimed documentary
Nuclear Tipping Point, the "four horsemen," as they're jokingly referred to, have helped defuse charges that disarmament is weakness. With arguments rooted in a realist understanding of global power, the
four warn that the United States cannot afford to live with the "very real possibility that the deadliest weapons ever invented could fall into dangerous hands."
28. Shai Agassi
for driving to make electric cars a reality.
CEO, Better Place | Palo Alto, Calif.
Israeli-born Shai Agassi is much more than a car-part inventor or a lithium-battery whiz: He's an electric-car prophet. Through his startup, Better Place, he has begun the crucial work of developing, and proselytizing for, the infrastructure necessary to make electric autos a mass-market success.
Agassi's sales pitch has global appeal: He has attracted more than $700 million in venture capital, and Australia, Denmark, Hawaii, and Israel have announced plans to build Agassi's networks. Tokyo's taxi drivers are already driving on the Better Place system, with San Francisco set to follow in 2011. Ranked third on
Fast Company's list of the most creative people in business,
Agassi said: "How do you run an entire country without oil, with no new science, … and in a time frame that's fast enough to get off oil before we run out of planet?" His answer, and increasingly the world's, is obvious.
35. Paul Farmer
for showing the world what to do, and what not to do, in Haiti.
Medical anthropologist, Harvard University | Boston
When the earthquake struck Haiti in January, donors around the world scrambled to figure out who was best prepared to help the survivors. The near-unanimous answer was Paul Farmer. For the last 23 years, Farmer has worked to make his organization, Partners in Health, a model for how aid can be done -- with local staff and low overhead, two characteristics that have made it indispensable this year. As U.N. Haiti envoy Bill Clinton's right-hand man, Farmer has lauded the generosity of the response to the earthquake, but he has also called the world out for shirking its responsibilities to the needy.
"NGOs have to be careful not to replace the state," he recently told students at Macalester College. "If they are filling the role the public sector should be filling, can they find a way to help rebuild that locally?" It's a lesson that, thanks in part to Farmer, is spreading around the world: The most successful aid efforts are driven by people on the ground, rather than dictates from Washington.
41. Mehdi Karroubi
for keeping the spirit of the Green Movement alive.
Cleric | Iran
Faced with an extraordinary crackdown by Iranian authorities, most leaders of Iran's Green Movement have faded from the public eye in the past year. This has left Mehdi Karroubi, a midranking cleric who finished well behind Mir Hossein Mousavi in Iran's disputed June 2009 presidential election, as one of the sole opposition figures left in the country.
A reformist with revolutionary credentials that date back to the Islamic Republic's founding, Karroubi was the first Green Movement leader to blast the regime for mistreating imprisoned opponents, and he's still going full tilt criticizing the government's mismanagement of the economy and the burgeoning influence of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Karroubi's courage carries real risks: Late last year, a special tribunal investigated him on charges of sedition, a crime that carries the death penalty. Then in September, plainclothes militia attacked Karroubi's house and tussled with his bodyguards. Tehran's chief prosecutor has said that Karroubi
will be tried "once public opinion is ready." But he says he
would welcome being brought to court: "It will be a good opportunity for me to talk again about crimes that would make the shah look good."
43. Nandan Nilekani
for proving that India can be not only democratic, but efficient.
Entrepreneur | India
India's breakneck expansion inspires as much fear as awe: Although the country's economy is expected to continue its steady march upward, its infrastructure is still woefully inadequate. Nandan Nilekani, an engineer who played a crucial role in bringing the high-tech revolution to India by co-founding IT giant Infosys Technologies, is looking to change that.
Nilekani's 2009 book,
Imagining India, laid out an ambitious reform agenda based on twin pillars of education and private enterprise. Now he appears determined to tackle the problem head-on, leaving the private sector to chair a new government agency charged with compiling a
national identification system for all Indians. It's not hard to see why the job, which combines his technological skills with his drive for rational government, appeals to Nilekani. For too long, he says, the country has been run on an "
aching-tooth approach," treating its problems only when crisis arises.
46. Kwame Anthony Appiah
for forging a code of ethics to fit a globalized world.
Philosopher, Princeton University | Princeton, N.J.
Once described as "our postmodern Socrates," Kwame Anthony Appiah has this year turned to the big subject of the social uses of honor around the world: His 2010 book,
The Honor Code, documents how it has been used to bring about "moral revolutions" -- the end of abhorrent practices such as slavery and foot-binding -- in the past, and how it can be used to end present evils such as honor killings. "You have to figure out how to get honor to concede to morality," the Princeton University professor
said recently. "My thought is: Don't abandon honor; reshape it." It's this unabashedly activist posture that sets Appiah -- who wrote an eloquent
letter nominating Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo for the Nobel Peace Prize -- apart from many of his colleagues. In fitting abstract concepts to the changing demands of the modern world, he is trying to make philosophy relevant again.
50. Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart
for keeping the focus on governance, not just guns.
Co-founders, Institute for State Effectiveness | Afghanistan, Washington
While others have been focused on winning the war in Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart have been thinking about how to win the peace. The two founders of the Institute for State Effectiveness, the world's most influential state-building think tank, have very different backgrounds: Ghani was born and raised in Afghanistan, trained as an anthropologist at Western universities, and served as his homeland's finance minister from 2002 to 2004 before his failed 2009 presidential bid; Lockhart was a lawyer and investment banker before stints at the World Bank and the U.N. But they share a common goal: a government in Kabul that can manage its own affairs.
Their 2008 book,
Fixing Failed States, suggests how to achieve this in bite-size chunks, and Ghani and Lockhart have since been invited to lend their nation-building insight to governments from Sudan to Lebanon to Nepal. And both remain staunch critics of Afghanistan's status quo, whether it's Ghani launching jeremiads against corruption or Lockhart pointing out that Afghanistan has wasted money by trying to convince expat Afghans to return home instead of investing in high schools and universities.
