Russia: Home of the Potemkin Nuclear Weapons? By Gwynne Dyer There’s a lot of performative militarism in Russia at the moment, which is unsurprising given that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is still stalled halfway through the fifth year of the war. The style is more Mussolini than Hitler, however, and the effect is more […]
‘When you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s hard to remember that your original goal was to drain the swamp.’ (Not very old folk saying) , Eighty years ago we set out to drain the swamp, because we feared that otherwise we would all be pulled under. At least fifty million people were dead
Vladimir Putin is a reckless man who invades countries and has his opponents killed, but he understands that some things are too dangerous to meddle with. That’s why he proposed last September that the United States and Russia should extend their ‘New START’ nuclear arms control treaty for one more year, to gain more negotiating
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
‘Predictions are hard, especially about the future’ (Danish proverb) but still we make them, especially when we care about the future. Here are some about the future of the United States in the next three and a bit years, expressed as probabilities although you should not trust the numbers. We can, for example, calculate the
The World Is Closing Down By Gwynne Dyer Straws in the wind: recently I ran across a post by the CEO of a nationwide professional association in Canada. People like him are used to hopping across the US border for various meetings several times a month, but he was remarking on what people had been
6 October 2024 Chinese Commies at 75 By Gwynne Dyer “No one can stop the wheel of history,” said China’s President Xi Jinping on the 75th anniversary of the day when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) proclaimed the creation of the People’s Republic of China. And the wheel is indeed still turning– but that may
10 April 2024 There Really Are Rules By Gwynne Dyer History is mostly a matter of dates, and the key date is always that of the last conquest. All previous conquests are then magically forgiven and forgotten. This observation is prompted partly by the current wars in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip, but equally by
18 November 2023 The Real Space Race By Gwynne Dyer The upside of Elon Musk is that he is a genius who has done useful things for the human race. He brought the idea of electric vehicles from harmless fringe tinkering to commercial mass production, and he may yet bring the cost of space flight
29 September 2023 Armenia: Not a Genocide By Gwynne Dyer It is a tragedy, but it is not a genocide. In a single week, almost all of the 120,000 Armenians who lived in the enclave in western Azerbaijan called Nagorno-Karabakh have fled across the border into Armenia. Most say they don’t expect ever to go