4 December 2022 Ukraine – Winter War By Gwynne Dyer When the two most senior military and intelligence officials in Washington make the same obvious error in public three times in three weeks, you have to wonder what they are really up to. Can it just be simple ignorance, or do they have a hidden …
18 July 2022 Iran Nukes: End of the Road By Gwynne Dyer About six weeks ago Rafael Grossi, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), warned that the attempt to revive the 2015 deal that restricted Iran’s ability to enrich uranium was on the brink of collapse. Three or four weeks more without …
15 June 2022 Ukraine: Rockets and Policy By Gwynne Dyer How would we know if the United States is deliberately starving Ukraine of weapons in order to force it into a compromise peace settlement that leaves some Ukrainian territory – maybe even a lot – in Russian hands? You can imagine the White House having …
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 …
15 February 2021 The self-esteem of two-year-olds and nation-states is too fragile for them to admit they were wrong, which makes it hard for them to move on from blunders. That’s why the toys don’t get picked up and the broken treaties don’t get fixed, and why there may be a tantrum (in the case …
30 December 2020 The recent war between Armenia and Azerbaijan made sense, in an old-fashioned way. The dispute was about territory – borders that were drawn almost a century ago by a Russian dictator, Joseph Stalin – and Azerbaijan had lost the last war and a lot of land. So the Azerbaijanis spent a lot …
3 November 2020 By the time you read this you may know more than I do as I write it, but some conclusions about the US election are already certain. First, this has been essentially a re-run of the 2016 presidential election. The final Electoral College tally and therefore the presidency may still be in …
7 October 2020 Now is when it gets interesting. The announcement last Friday that US President Donald Trump had fallen ill with Covid-19 hardly came as a surprise. His political strategy of playing down Covid-19 required him to be reckless about his own health, and other Republicans were already dropping like flies. Fourteen Republican Senators …
16 September 2020 President Donald Trump declared “the dawn of a new Middle East” in Washington on Tuesday as the United Arab Emirates and Bahrein signed public agreements with Israel for the first time. Not “peace agreements”, as Trump claimed, since neither country has ever been at war with Israel. Just documents involving an exchange …
8 September 2020 Nine of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies have just promised not to apply for regulatory approval for any new Covid-19 vaccine before it has gone through all three phases of clinical study. Why would they do such a thing? You’d be surprised if brain surgeons got together and promised not to operate …