4 September 2022 The Last Empire By Gwynne Dyer This is not another pipe-sucking reassessment of Mikhail Gorbachev’s failed attempt to democratise the Soviet Union thirty years ago. He wasn’t actually trying to do that anyway; he was attempting to save the Soviet Union and Communism by civilising and softening the harsh Bolshevik dictatorship that …
18 May 2022 By Gwynne Dyer Russian President Vladimir Putin will almost certainly not be in power three years from now. The war he foolishly began in Ukraine has fatally undermined his political credibility among the Russian elite (and among a large though mostly silent part of the population). One way or another, he will …
January 13, 2022 · by GWYNNE DYER Two questions about recent events in Kazakhstan. First, was last week’s slaughterhouse battle between “20,000 bandits” and the regime’s police in Almaty, the country’s biggest city, really just a quarrel among thieves? And second, why did Russian troops get involved? Kazakhstan is a kleptocracy: “a state where corrupt …
27 September 2021 The Quad and the Next Cold War By Gwynne Dyer Never mind AUKUS. It’s the Quad that counts. The creation of an Australia-United Kingdom-United States military alliance last week caused a tempest in a teapot, but the real action was elsewhere. In Washington on Friday the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (‘Quad’ for short) …
15 March 2021 It has been quite pleasant living on a planet where most of the great powers were not locked up into two hostile nuclear-armed alliances, but nothing lasts forever. Creeping shyly onto the stage via Zoom, the successor to NATO emerged into public view last Friday. It’s called the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue – …
28 September 2020 It’s probably Azerbaijan that started the shooting in this latest round of fighting with neighbouring Armenia. Which is not to say that it’s all Azerbaijan’s fault. The killing that started on Sunday is the biggest clash since the cease-fire of 1994: helicopters shot down, tanks blown up, and dozens of soldiers dead …
For the second time in a month, a member country of the European Union has NOT voted a populist into power. Could it be that the populist wave has broken? It would be a good time for that to happen, because elections to the EU’s parliament are next month. The hard-right populist parties that have …
Lots of countries have two or more official languages: Canada (two), Belgium (three), Switzerland (four), South Africa (eleven), India (twenty-three), and so on. They all have trouble balancing the competing demands of the various language groups. But Latvia has only one official language, and it has a bigger problem than any of them. “There’s no …
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 …
There is momentous change in Angola. The oil-rich country of 28 million people on Africa’s southwestern coast has just elected J-Lo as president. There is also very little change in Angola. The new president is not Jennifer Lopez, the American J.Lo (which would definitely mean big change). It is João Lourenço, a member of the …