Showing 1 - 10 of 24
Somaliland: Mixed motivations
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 03/01/2026
» Last week Israel was the first country in the world to establish diplomatic relations with Somaliland. Not Somalia, a wreck of a country on the East African coast that has been mired in civil war for the past thirty-five years, but Somaliland, a different country just north of there that has been peaceful, relatively prosperous and even democratic for all those years.
EU leaders must master Trump management
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 19/08/2025
» It's like one of those slapstick comedies from the early days of silent films: the "Keystone Cops" movies, perhaps, or Buster Keaton's various efforts. Lots of people rushing around, constant reversals of fortune, and many pratfalls.
Where shall we put all the Palestinians?
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 07/06/2025
» Reckless people fling accusations of attempted genocide in Gaza at the Israeli coalition government and the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) every day, but the scale of the operation is not remotely big enough to justify that word.
Can Ukraine survive Trump presidency?
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 21/05/2025
» We are getting very close to the point where Donald Trump realises that his dear friend, Vladimir Putin, has been playing him for a fool. The Russian president never had the slightest intention of moderating his war aims, which include the annexation of much of Ukraine and the demotion of the rest to the status of a puppet state.
Deportations and walls in the US and Europe
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 31/08/2024
» Fortress America and Festung Europa (Fortress Europe) are just starting to take shape; bare outlines of what they will have grown into ten years from now. But the trend is almost unstoppable, and it will be very ugly when it's finished.
Will US military aid to Ukraine tip the scales?
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 24/04/2024
» 'I've said before, you do the right thing and you let the chips fall where they may," said Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives. The chips being the 10 or 20,000 extra Ukrainians who died needlessly during the six months when the Republican Party blocked the sending of any more US military aid to Ukraine.
The fascists are (probably not) coming after all
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 29/01/2024
» ‘Fascism is on the march everywhere!” shrieked the headline on a recent think-piece by my least favourite foreign affairs commentator (who must remain nameless because I don’t want to give him any publicity). But articles and op-eds about the fascist threat are certainly on the march, and occasionally a real fascist pops up in public.
Waging a just war and the Gaza Strip
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 07/12/2023
» 'If you [Americans] were OK with us killing 5,000 children, you are OK with killing 10,000 children," said Daniel Levy, a former Israeli diplomat who helped negotiate the Oslo peace accords in the 1990s. That's what Israeli diplomats really think of US policy, he says.
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)
A resurgence of alliances is an echo of past wars
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 21/01/2023
» Alliances are as old as civilisation. Older, actually: almost every hunter-gatherer band that anthropologists have studied, from the New Guinea highlanders to the Yanomamo in the Amazon, made alliances with other groups to try to protect themselves.