We don’t have to look very far to find a useful historical analogy for the current crisis in the Middle East. In 1967 Egypt closed the Strait of Tiran to Israeli ships, and Israel replied with a surprise air attack that destroyed almost the entire Egyptian air force on the ground. Israel followed up with […]
The Iranians know they have won, but President Trump doesn’t get it yet. He’s still at the stage of counting up the US and Israeli air-strikes and assuming that those numbers mean a US victory is possible. But five gets you ten that the Iranians are already thinking about nuclear weapons. Not their own, which
Fidel Castro and his Communist band of brothers have had a good long run in power (66 years), but they have run out of road. Most of the relatively small Cuban middle class fled to the United States after the 1959 revolution, but the new regime certainly had mass popular support for at least the
In 1910 Henry Wilson, the British army officer charged with planning for a possible war with Germany, visited the French officer doing the same job in Paris, Ferdinand Foch. The Anglo-French alliance was still a tentative, semi-secret thing, so Wilson asked Foch “What is the smallest British military force that would be of any practical
‘Made You Look’ is a children’s game where a kid points to something that doesn’t exist just to get another kid to look in that direction. Then the perpetrator mocks the victim: “Made you look! Made you look!” One of the dumber games, but it usually works. Donald Trump is a master of this game.
Three months have passed since ‘Operation Midnight Hammer’ saw seven American B2 bombers drop fourteen ‘bunker-buster’ 14,000-kg. Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs on Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities. But where is the highly enriched uranium that was theoretically the key objective for this operation? “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated,” US President
Three Months Later: Where Are Iran’s Fabled Nukes? Read More »
If Donald Trump were a religious man, he might have said “There but for the grace of God go I” when he heard that former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro has been sentenced to 27 years in prison. Bolsonaro’s crime was to have plotted a coup to take back the presidency he lost in the 2022
Brazil and the United States: Same Crime, Different Fate Read More »
The AI Crash By Gwynne Dyer As ever, we are living on borrowed time. There’s the familiar old threat of global nuclear war and the growing risk of global climate catastrophe, plus not-quite-world-ending potential disasters like global pandemics and untoward astronomical events (asteroid strikes, solar flares, etc.) Lots to worry about already, if you’re that
Trump: The Least Bad Outcome By Gwynne Dyer I would rather eat worms than write about the current hullabaloo on the American right over the conspiracy theories about paedophile Jeffrey Epstein and his various pals and accomplices. The temptation is just to sit back and enjoy watching the MAGA revolution devour its own children, but
Climate: A Happy Surprise By Gwynne Dyer Start with China, the world’s biggest emitter by far of greenhouse gases: 27% of the entire world’s emissions, and more than twice that of the second-biggest emitter, the United States. In fact, it’s more than all the emissions of all the other developed countries combined. Bad China. But