Carney’s Campaign by Gwynne Dyer “You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose,” said former New York Governor Mario Cuomo forty years ago. Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney is now in the poetic phase of his campaign to create an alliance – maybe just a loose alliance – of middle powers who can resist the […]
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
7 June 2026 Solar Storms: One Thing Less to Worry About? By Gwynne Dyer Solar storms are not even in my top five threat list to humankind (nuclear war, asteroid strikes, super-volcano eruptions, a supernova within 30-50 light years, and intergalactic pirates), but they are still worth talking about. Especially because there may be an
A consensus has emerged, at least in Western media, that we are on the brink of a real war with the gloves off, maybe even a ‘world war’. The Russian dictator Vladimir Putin will overrun the rest of Europe as soon as he is finished with Ukraine. Donald Trump will invade Cuba even before he
With a record of five failures and six partial successes in his Starship program, the twelfth launch on 22 May of Elon Musk’s BFR* (as he and the boys used to call it before the PR people intervened) was critical for the success of the whole SpaceX enterprise. Doubts were growing, and the Initial Public
“We’re offering a very fair and reasonable DEAL, and I hope they take it because, if they don’t, the United States is going to knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran.” Familiarly genocidal threats from Donald Trump, with the trademark mobster-style “NO MORE MR NICE GUY” at the end. Amazing
Asked on Wednesday if he would reconsider his decision to pull the United States out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), Donald Trump said “it’s beyond reconsideration. I just think it should be automatic.” So that’s a definite ‘maybe’. He’s very cross at the moment, because not one of NATO’s 31 other members has
In Quebec the English-speaking minority used to call them ‘tongue-troopers’: the government functionaries who come around to check that the French on signs in shops is in a typeface twice as big as the English. Now China will have tongue-troopers too, although the regime has no fear that Chinese might be replaced by Zhuang, Kazakh
It’s too early to be sure, but it seems likely that we have just seen ‘Peak Trump’. Last week Donald Trump arrived at the Davos conference radiating power and menace. Fresh from his attack on Venezuela, he was going to invade and annex Greenland. If his European allies in the NATO alliance tried to protect
Democracy is in retreat or at least on the defensive almost everywhere, while wars are getting bigger and more frequent. The trend lines are frighteningly bad. There are big wars in Ukraine and Sudan and another one is only on temporary hold in Gaza. Smaller wars are underway in Yemen, Burma, and Thailand/Cambodia, and a