8 March 2023 ‘General Winter’ Missed the Bus By Gwynne Dyer “The cold is coming soon,” gloated former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev last June. He predicted that the citizens of the European Union, deprived of the Russian gas that normally supplied about 40% of their energy, would be freezing in their homes when ‘General Winter’ …
30 August 2022 The United Kingdom: The Once and Future King By Gwynne Dyer As a child, outgoing British Prime Minister Boris Johnson reportedly said he wanted to be ‘King of the World’. He ended up in a somewhat humbler role, was rejected by his own party’s members of parliament for his mendacity, corruption and …
“The sinking ship has left the rat,” said Keir Starmer, leader of Britain’s Labour Party, as the ruling Conservative Party forced Prime Minister Boris Johnson to resign as party leader. He had told one lie too many, and his own party’s patience finally ran out. There were many other reasons to ditch him. Almost all …
9 May 2022 By Gwynne Dyer Four months ago Jonathan Powell warned that the ‘Good Friday’ agreement of 1998 that ended thirty years of killing in Northern Ireland was at risk. “What worries me is the casual political vandalism. They really don’t seem to care (about) the damage they are doing to the very fragile …
Here’s how the French presidential election is going to work. This Sunday’s vote will pick the leading two candidates, who will then have another two weeks to campaign for the run-off vote. But the leading four candidates are now bunched together so closely in the polls that any two of them could make it through …
26 January 2022 Boris Johnson: The Long Goodbye By Gwynne Dyer The plot couldn’t be more familiar: criminal mastermind gets away with endless daring escapades, and is brought down in the end by some silly little mistake. That’s Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who slid effortlessly through endless scrapes and scandals that would have finished …
12 January 2022 Covid Fatigue By Gwynne Dyer Once they called it ‘combat fatigue’, and treated the soldiers who showed the symptoms with a mixture of pity and contempt. Then they renamed it ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’ (PTSD) and broadened the definition to cover similar responses to other stressful situations. And now we have Covid fatigue. …
3 January 2022 Nuclear Power: The Missing Piece of the Puzzle By Gwynne Dyer At the stroke of midnight last Friday, half of Germany’s remaining nuclear power stations closed down. The remaining three plants (of an original seventeen) will shut down on 31 December of this year, and Germans will no longer have to live …
26 October 2021 “The world is on a catastrophic pathway to 2.7°C of heating,” said UN Secretary General António Guterres. “There is a high risk of failure of COP26.” That’s the global climate summit that meets every five years (but was postponed last year because of the pandemic) to plot a course away from climate …
Looking for the Pain Threshold: Why COP26 Won’t Deliver Read More »
17 October 2021 International treaties are serious business. A lot of time and effort goes into negotiating them, and they become part of international law. It’s very rare for a politician to say, only a couple of years after negotiating a treaty, that his country always felt it was “a little bit provisional and open …