12 February 2023 The Earthquakes and the Blame By Gwynne Dyer If you are trying to dodge the blame for a great disaster, the best policy is to say that it was God’s will. So Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, visiting one of the 6,000 buildings that collapsed on their sleeping residents in eastern Turkey …
11 September 2022 Ukraine: The Risk of a Ceasefire Dwindles By Gwynne Dyer Two months ago John Bolton wrote an article in ‘The Hill’, the leading politics website in Washington, warning against a Russian ‘October Surprise’. He suggested that Russian President Vladimir Putin might suddenly stop military operations and declare a ceasefire – which would …
7 August 2022 Israel, Gaza and ‘Strategic Proportionalism’ By Gwynne Dyer There may be a truce in the latest lopsided war in Gaza by the time you read this, but it looks a lot like the previous ones in 2008, 2014 and 2021: the Israelis arrest or kill some leaders of the Palestinian resistance movements …
4 April 2022 Two Truces By Gwynne Dyer Two weeks ago, the three biggest wars in the world were in Ukraine, Ethiopia and Yemen. Now truces have silenced the guns and the airstrikes in two of the three. They are only temporary truces so far, but there is a reasonable chance that they could grow …
14 June 2021 “Lifting Trump’s sanctions, @SecBlinken, is a legal& moral obligation, NOT negotiating leverage. Didn’t work for Trump – won’t work for you,” tweeted Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif late last month. But what if US Secretary of State Antony Blinken (and President Joe Biden) have just decided that reviving the 2015 nuclear …
7 April 2021 First, the good news. The United States and Iran had talks in Vienna on Tuesday, and the nuclear deal they and all the other great powers signed in 2015 is coming back. It’s not exactly back yet. After Donald Trump unilaterally pulled out of the treaty in 2018 and re-imposed harsh sanctions …
25 November 2020 “The only officials present were American and Saudi,” tweeted the Saudi Arabian foreign minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, but he was lying. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu really did fly in to Saudi Arabia to spend a few hours with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and US Secretary of State …
15 August 2020 The ‘two-state solution’ is still dead. The deal to open diplomatic ties between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, announced by Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem on Thursday, opens no new vistas for a ‘just peace’ between the Israelis and the Arabs. It just repackages the existing reality. There wasn’t …
Last week the United States imposed new sanctions on Syria: a “sustained campaign of economic and political pressure” to end the nine-year war by forcing President Bashar al-Assad to UN-brokered peace talks where he would negotiate his departure from power. Assad’s wife was already cross about not being able to shop at Harrod’s or Bergdorf …
If the Iranians played the game the same way that Donald Trump does, then their revenge for the American assassination of Iran’s leading general, Qassem Soleimani, would be a simple tit-for-tat. Just kill US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the man who actually organised the hit and then boasted about it. If Pompeo was too …