‘Wait for September’. By Gwynne Dyer Making predictions in print is rarely a good idea, and saying ‘I told you so’ is always rude, but rules are made to be broken. On 10 June, one week before the short-lived ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ (MoU) on the Middle East war was signed, I wrote a piece on […]
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,
War-Weary By Gwynne Dyer I have been writing this column twice a week for a long time, so I have a finely developed sense for when the audience is sick of a subject. We have definitely crossed that boundary with regard to the wars currently being fought up and down the strip of land between
Courts Are the Last Defence Against Tyranny By Gwynne Dyer India and the United States are the world’s two biggest democracies, and both of them seem to be in danger. In each of them populist federal governments are deliberately polarising the population, radicalising the politics, and seeking to undermine the impartial rule of law. In
Netanyahu’s Remaining Options By Gwynne Dyer “The graveyards are full of indispensable men,” said former French Premier Georges Clemenceau about a century ago, and it’s still true. Israel’s precisely timed surprise attack on Iran on 28 February killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and seven of his closest allies in thirty seconds, but they turned out
Colombia: Don’t Rock the Boat By Gwynne Dyer “He won, BIG!” exulted Donald Trump on Truth Social, welcoming the victory of Abelardo De La Espriella, his preferred candidate for the presidency of Colombia, in last Monday’s election. In fact De La Espriella won only very small, less than 1 percent ahead of his left-wing opponent
Tulsi Gabbard, the recently resigned/retired/fired US Director of National Intelligence, told Congress just two months ago that US intelligence agencies had concluded Iran was not building nuclear weapons. Indeed, she added, experts also determined Iran had not resumed its suspended 2003 nuclear weapons programme. However, Donald Trump said she was “wrong” His claim that “Iran
Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu, has just asked the country’s president, Isaac Herzog, to “fully pardon” him of all three charges – bribery, fraud and breach of trust – that he has been on trial for since 2020. And the question is: why did he only ask for it now? The alleged crimes were
If the Ukrainians feel the time has come to surrender to the Russians, they don’t need Donald Trump’s help. The ‘ungrateful’ wretches can do that for themselves. The Russian ‘peace’ offer that Trump is trying to force on Ukraine this time is almost identical to the one that Russian leader Vladimir Putin pitched to him
Populist parties are already in power in some developed countries and waiting just outside the door in many more. The key trick of populist politicians is to tell the voters what they want to hear, and the voters definitely do not want their lives to be disrupted by global heating, so they are told it