29 December 2021 China: No More Mr. Nice Guy By Gwynne Dyer More than 200 Hong Kong police raided and shut down one of the last pro-democracy news websites in Hong Kong on Wednesday, in the latest sign that the Beijing regime will no longer tolerate dissent of any kind. It was total overkill – …
27 December 2021 ‘Nuclear Twilight’: Something Else to Worry About By Gwynne Dyer As a dreadful year draws to an end and the Omicron variant turns out to be less lethal than its predecessors, premature outbreaks of cheerfulness have been spotted in many quarters. As I am under a contractual obligation to keep the readers …
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22 December 2021 The Right Enemy By Gwynne Dyer The right enemy can be a major asset in politics, as Chilean voters have just demonstrated once again. All the opinion polls had the two presidential candidates neck and neck before Sunday’s election, but a few days before the vote it came out that the father …
19 December 2021 Humouring Putin By Gwynne Dyer The geopolitical question of the moment is: how important is it to humour Russian leader Vladimir Putin? The answer is: not very. Throw him a fish or two, because he’s running a bluff and you don’t want to humiliate him, but there’s no need to placate him …
15 December 2021 Chilean Election By Gwynne Dyer British journalist Claude Cockburn once claimed that he won a contest among the sub-editors on the London Times to write the dullest headline and actually get it published in the paper. His winning headline was ‘Small Earthquake in Chile, Not Many Hurt’. It must annoy Chileans, but …
12 December 2021 Energy: The Risks of Success By Gwynne Dyer The “new normal”, said International Energy Agency spokesperson Heymi Bahar last May, may be a far faster expansion of renewable energy than expected, driven mainly by market forces. So fast, in fact, that it raises a different kind of risk (but he didn’t mention …
8 December 2021 Ukraine: No Invasion By Gwynne Dyer I must admit that I googled the plot of the 1997 film ‘Wag the Dog’ before starting to write this. It’s a dark comedy about a US president facing a sex scandal whose staff invent a completely fictional war in the Balkans to draw the media’s …
6 December 2021 The Nuclear Deal is Dead! Long Live Deterrence! By Gwynne Dyer “We reviewed the proposals … carefully and thoroughly and concluded that Iran violated almost all compromises found previously in months of hard negotiations,” said the German Foreign Ministry spokesperson on Sunday. As a funeral oration, it lacked in elegance, but it …