Canada vs. United States: Evenly Matched By Gwynne Dyer Canada’s ‘trade war’ with the United States, ignited on 21 August when Prime Minister Mark Carney walked out of trade talks with the Trump administration, is not the foredoomed David-vs.-Goliath struggle that it seems. It’s really about sovereignty, not trade, and Canada stands a fair chance […]
Ukraine: Democracy and Corruption By Gwynne Dyer “Democracy cannot be held hostage by Russia,” said Mihaylo Fedorov, until recently Ukraine’s defence minister. “We must find a legal, safe and realistic mechanism which will allow Ukraine to renew its full democratic process even in the conditions of a long war.” Seven years after the last election,
A Climate Grand Jeté By Gwynne Dyer The first hurricane to hit Hawaii in 34 years. The Mediterranean on fire from Spain to Greece. ‘Heat domes’ one after another for months on end in Europe and North America. Thousands of excess deaths. A record ‘El Niño’ piled on top of an average global temperature up
Africa: Getting History Wrong By Gwynne Dyer “I think that there’s a strategy to divide and conquer and to create a very contrived confusion,” said Samuel Okuzeto Ablakwan, Ghana’s foreign minster. “We denounce and totally reject those claims that Africans are as guilty and complicit as those who masterminded this whole atrocity.” He’s wrong, of
The Gaza Charade By Gwynne Dyer Last month US President Donald Trump announced “a monumental step toward lasting peace and security” in Gaza. Mediators from the ‘Board of Peace’, his sketchy rival to the United Nations, had persuaded Hamas, the Palestinian armed resistance movement, to accept his ‘15-point document’ for Hamas disarmament and Israeli withdrawal
AI and Bio-weapons By Gwynne Dyer ‘Artificial intelligence’ based on Large Language Models is shaping up to be the most efficient destroyer of value since the South Sea Bubble. After the Crash, some specific functions of AI will eventually turn out to be genuinely revenue-generating, and a lot of jobs will duly disappear. But the
Venezuela: Unfinished Business By Gwynne Dyer Experienced imperialists understand that you can’t just take over a country over and expect it to run itself. It takes time and work to turn it into an obedient and profitable colony, and two months is not enough. Donald Trump moved on to his next target too soon, and
Cyril Ramaphosa and the Law By Gwynne Dyer It’s outrageous. You’re at your hobby farm in the country, just pottering around, so you stuff the $580,000 in your pocket under the sofa cushions temporarily just to get it out of the way. Then you forget it when you are gathering things up to go back
Climate: What To Do Now By Gwynne Dyer I was reading an article about the current wildfires written in a reputable paper by a recognised ‘environmental journalist’, but I stumbled to a halt when I read the following sentence: “While the skies over North America and Europe will eventually clear, this climate change-driven era of
Russia: Home of the Potemkin Nuclear Weapons? By Gwynne Dyer There’s a lot of performative militarism in Russia at the moment, which is unsurprising given that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is still stalled halfway through the fifth year of the war. The style is more Mussolini than Hitler, however, and the effect is more