The Russian word ‘derzhavnost’ is usually translated as ‘great power status’, but the real meaning is closer to the gangland concept of ‘respect’. The word was beyond the reach of my feeble Russian vocabulary until I heard it about twenty times in twenty minutes while interviewing an ultranationalist ideologue called Aleksandr Dugin about twenty years […]
Russia’s “big concession is they stop fighting, and they don’t take any more land,” US President Donald Trump said on Tuesday, when asked what Russia was conceding in the thinly disguised surrender document he was trying to shove down Ukrainian throats. He truly is a 19th-century man at heart. Those were the good old days,
The Goal is to Destroy the International Rule of Law Read More »
Q: Why do some Canadians want Trump to invade Venezuela? A: Because if Trump invades Venezuela first, he’ll get bogged down in that war and never get around to invading Canada. Actually, most Canadians are not thinking that, because a) Venezuela is not even on their mental maps, and b) they are not convinced that
Back in the 16th and 17th centuries, two-thirds of the Danish kingdom’s income came from taxes paid by every ship passing through the Øresund strait (‘The Sound’), the only exit from the Baltic Sea. Each ship had to declare the value of its cargo – and if the Danes thought they were understating it, Denmark
“The thing that comforts me,” said Jeff Boudier at Hugging Face, the leading open platform for AI builders, “is that the internet was built on the ashes of the over-investment into the telecom infrastructure of yesterday” during the dot.com boom of the late 1990s. The coming AI crash “is going to enable lots of great
Ukraine: Deadlines By Gwynne Dyer “I love deadlines,” said Douglas Adams, author of ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’. “I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” Donald Trump sets deadlines for more complicated reasons that purport to be tactical, but he too is addicted to the whooshing sound they make when
Of Apes, Men and War By Gwynne Dyer Now would be a good time to watch a Netflix documentary series called ‘Chimp Empire’. It’s about one year of an ongoing war between two bands of chimpanzees, shot up close and personal, and the narrator never suggests that there is any similarity between their war and
Taiwan: No Panic By Gwynne Dyer . “I hope I am wrong. My gut tells me we [the US and China] will fight in 2025,” wrote General Mike Minihan, head of US Air Mobility Command, in a private memo two years ago. There’s still five months to go, but I’m going to go out on
The Next Forever War By Gwynne Dyer He didn’t take two weeks to make up his mind whether or not to bomb Iran; only two days. Donald Trump is not a patient man. But he has just started another American ‘forever war’ in the Middle East, so he will have plenty of time to work
War is in the Air By Gwynne Dyer “There is a clear, present risk, particularly as Vladimir Putin does see himself as being at war with the West. The homeland is again (in peril)…Air and missile attacks will potentially cause civilian casualties (in the United Kingdom) in very large numbers.” Therefore, concludes General Sir Richard