22 July 2020 Is there going to be a new Cold War with China? Probably not. Consider the case of Huawei. Mike Pompeo swept into London on Tuesday like an overweight Darth Vader, while his local satrap, Boris Johnson, waited nervously in Downing Street for judgement. People swore they could hear Pompeo’s cloak swish as …
Stanislav Petrov was never famous in Russia, just another forgotten pensioner, so the news of his death at 77 in Moscow on 19 May only recently reached other countries. He wasn’t all that famous abroad either, but people in the know think he may have saved the world from nuclear war. “The siren howled, but …
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Karl Marx, 1852 We would all prefer a farce to a tragedy, so let us hope that Marx was right. But he has been wrong a …
If the US Congress had not imposed a two-term limit on the presidency in 1947 after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s record four electoral victories, President Barack Obama would be a safe bet for a third term next November. He inherited the worst recession since the Great Depression, and now the United States has the healthiest economy …
The current ceasefire in the war in eastern Ukraine, the so-called Minsk-2 agreement, was signed last February, but they never actually ceased firing. At least a thousand more people have been killed in the fighting since then, and on one night last month (14 August) the monitors of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in …
“The world is on the brink of a new Cold War. Some say that it has already begun,” said Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union and the man who inadvertently administered a mercy killing to Communism in Europe. He’s 83 years old, he played a leading role in ending the last Cold …
Crimea is going to be part of Russia, and there is nothing anybody else can do about it. The petty sanctions that the United States and the European Union are currently imposing have been discounted in advance by Moscow, and even much more serious sanctions would not move it to reconsider its actions. But Vladimir …
14 September 2010 The Millennium Goals By Gwynne Dyer “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor. Rich is better.” It may have been Ella Fitzgerald who first said that, or maybe it was Sophie Tucker. Doesn’t matter. It’s true, other things being equal – but “other things” are not equal. On 20-22 September, while the …
19 March 2010 British and French Boomers By Gwynne Dyer As a general rule, we should all encourage and support international cooperation. Once in a while, however, a proposal comes along that is so disconnected from reality that you check the date in case it’s April Fool’s Day. There is now such a proposal on …
18 February 2009 A Collision at Sea By Gwynne Dyer A ship I once served in had a small brass plate on the bridge with a quotation from Thucydides, the Greek statesman, historian and seaman of the fourth century BC: “A collision at sea can ruin your whole day.” It is still true. It is …