10 October 2021 Will China Invade Taiwan? By Gwynne Dyer China’s President Xi Jinping promised on Saturday that “The historical task of the complete reunification of the motherland… will definitely be fulfilled.” That was a threat to Taiwan, but a threat without a deadline. However Chinese state media, in the form of the ever-rabid ‘Global …
5 October 2021 Volcanoes, Tsunamis and Risk By Gwynne Dyer ‘Don’t bother your pretty head about it’ is the prevailing media take on the risk of the volcanic eruption on La Palma in the Canary Islands turning into a mega-tsunami disaster. The media definitely over-hyped that risk when it was first suggested twenty years ago, …
2 October 2021 Destroy the Whistle-Blowers! By Gwynne Dyer A long time ago now I was asked to do a television series about the world’s intelligence services – and I turned it down flat. My main reason was a feeling that there was less to the whole intelligence world than met the eye, and the …
29 September 2021 Humans in the Americas: Two Mysteries By Gwynne Dyer It’s been the biggest shock in archaeology for a long time. British and American archaeologists have found solid evidence that human beings – we could call them ‘the forerunners’ – were in the Americas around 6,000 years before the earliest previously accepted date. …
27 September 2021 The Quad and the Next Cold War By Gwynne Dyer Never mind AUKUS. It’s the Quad that counts. The creation of an Australia-United Kingdom-United States military alliance last week caused a tempest in a teapot, but the real action was elsewhere. In Washington on Friday the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (‘Quad’ for short) …
22 September 2021 After Merkel By Gwynne Dyer Last January Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) were ahead in the German opinion polls by fifteen points. She was stepping down after sixteen years as chancellor (prime minister), but she was still by far the most trusted politician in Germany. Indeed, she is universally known as ‘Mutti’ …
18 Sept 2021 AUKUS: An Alliance Is Born! By Gwynne Dyer When the 9/11 attacks struck New York and Washington in 2001 and the US armed forces went on full alert, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice immediately got on the direct line to Moscow and told Vladimir Putin not to worry: the United States was …
15 September 2021 Norway, Oil and Climate By Gwynne Dyer You can see why Saudi Arabia wants to go on pumping as much oil as it can. Oil exports account for 87% of the Saudi government budget and 42% of GDP. The Saudi population, now 35 million, is growing by two-thirds of a million a …
12 September 2021 Auto-Eugenics in America By Gwynne Dyer Eugenics was a 20th-century pseudo-science that purported to improve the human breed by weeding out the ‘least fit’, often by measures like compulsory sterilisation or, in the case of the Nazis, death camps. But this is the 21st century, and now people can do it for …
8 September 2021 It Didn’t Change the World Forever By Gwynne Dyer ‘Changed the world forever’ is the most hackneyed phrase in journalism, and if you can get through this week (the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks) without hearing it half a dozen times you’ll be very lucky. It’s a nonsense phrase because various …