Showing 1 - 10 of 26
Is it the end of populism, or just a pause?
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 19/06/2023
» We're going to miss the populist "big beasts" now that they're gone. Who will now tell us that "Voting Conservative will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3"? (Boris Johnson) Who will describe Barack Obama as "handsome, young and also suntanned"? (Silvio Berlusconi)
Beijing will use 'floggings' until morale improves
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 14/03/2023
» Xi Jinping was confirmed in a third term as president of China at the National People's Congress last week, and not one of the 3,000 delegates voted against him. Why would they? Everything is perfect in the People's Republic of Oz, and the chief Wizard doesn't even to need to hide behind a curtain.
Hypersonic missiles are a needless complication
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 13/11/2021
» 'I saw in some of the newspapers they used the term 'Sputnik moment'," said General Mark Milley, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. "I don't know if it's quite a Sputnik moment, but I think it's very close to that. It's a very significant technological event that occurred."
Norway, oil and the issue of climate change
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 02/10/2021
» You can see why Saudi Arabia wants to go on pumping as much oil as it can. Oil exports account for 87% of the Saudi government budget and 42% of GDP. The Saudi population, now 35 million, is growing by two-thirds of a million a year, and the country already imports 80% of its food. They'd be starving in a few years if they stopped pumping.
After Merkel, who will fill her 'sensible shoes'?
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 25/09/2021
» Last January Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) were ahead in the German opinion polls by 15 points. She was stepping down after 16 years as chancellor (prime minister), but she was still by far the most trusted politician in Germany. Indeed, she is universally known as "Mutti" ("Mummy").
Recycled wars of benighted Afghanistan
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 18/08/2021
» In the year 2000, five years after the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan, nobody elsewhere cared what happened in that land-locked, benighted country. It was ruled by angry rural fanatics who tormented the local people with their demented rules for proper "Islamic" behaviour, but it was not a military or diplomatic priority for anybody.
The 'defence' follies of 'little boys' at play
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 26/03/2021
» In the early decades of the Cold War, this was the season when North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) defence chiefs would announce their spending plans for the next year, and they would almost always "discover" some new threat from the Soviet Union to justify the money. In the United States, for example, the intelligence services traditionally found a Soviet armoured brigade hiding in Cuba every February or March.
Can Navalny change Russia like Lenin did?
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 22/01/2021
» When Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny returned to Moscow on Sunday after convalescing in Germany from an attempted poisoning by the FSB domestic spy agency, the regime-friendly media loyally failed to mention his arrival. With one striking exception: Vremya, the flagship news show of Russian state television.
Anti-abortion laws and radicalisation
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 16/12/2020
» 'Get your rosaries off our ovaries," chanted the women marching in support of the referendum that made abortion legal in Ireland in 2018. Two years later the 2020 election broke the century-long stranglehold on power of the two centre-right parties, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael. They got fewer than half the votes even together.
What will a post-oil Middle East look like?
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 27/11/2020
» 'The only officials present were American and Saudi," tweeted the Saudi Arabian foreign minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, but he was lying. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu really did fly in to Saudi Arabia to spend a few hours with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.