30 April 2023 Thailand: Another Round? By Gwynne Dyer There have been occasional violent episodes in Thai politics and one recent massacre (2010), but the struggle for a genuine democracy has usually been relatively restrained. Maybe that is why it has lasted so long. In fact, the tug-of-war between the army, the monarchy and the …
25 April 2023 Ukraine: What the Global South Thinks By Gwynne Dyer There is a deep and growing rift between ‘the West’ and ‘the Rest’ about the need to resist and defeat the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This is because it is really a war in defence of sovereignty, which ought to be something every …
22 April 2023 Starship: The Iterative Design Methodology By Gwynne Dyer “Obviously, this is not a nominal situation,” said John Insprucker, a senior engineer at Space-X, who was doing a webcast on Thursday’s launch attempt of Elon Musk’s gigantic Starship rocket. So why did Musk’s employees, hundreds of whom were watching live, cheer when it …
19 April 2023 What Goes ‘Moo’ And Then Explodes? By Gwynne Dyer “When I do a puzzle with my daughters, there is usually an elephant next to a giraffe next to a rhino,” said Prof. Ron Milo of the Weizmann Institute of Science. “But if I was trying to give them a more realistic sense …
16 April 2023 Sudan: The Thieves Fall Out By Gwynne Dyer It’s a pity that both sides can’t lose in the war that broke out between rival generals in Sudan on Saturday, but the best that the 48 million Sudanese can hope for now is that one side loses quickly. Beyond that, it’s all bad: …
12 April 2023 Taiwan: Ignore China’s Conniptions By Gwynne Dyer China has been having conniptions again. President Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan had a courtesy meeting last week with the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy. Beijing reacted by issuing a “stern warning” to the United States, and then “encircled” the island (its …
8 April 2023 Good Friday Agreement Plus 25 By Gwynne Dyer US President Joe Biden is visiting Ireland this week* to celebrate an anniversary that almost didn’t happen. It’s the 25th anniversary of the ‘Good Friday Agreement’ of 1998 that ended thirty years of killing in Northern Ireland, but it almost unravelled this year. The …
4 April 2023 Before the Great Ukrainian Offensive By Gwynne Dyer Monday’s stunt, where Yevgeny Prigozhin held a Russian flag in his hands and declared that his ‘Wagner’ mercenary soldiers have finally conquered the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, probably marks the end of Russian winter offensive. It was just a charade, of course. The footage …
2 April 2023 Pakistan: Endless Turmoil By Gwynne Dyer Last year US President Joe Biden called Pakistan “one of the most dangerous countries in the world,” presumably because of its potentially lethal cocktail of nuclear weapons and unstable politics. But somehow it staggers on endlessly, never resolving its permanent political crisis but never quite exploding …