Showing 1 - 10 of 13
It could take 1 Danish soldier in Greenland
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 23/01/2026
» 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 assistance to you?"
We've all seen this war game play out before
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 20/06/2025
» I've seen this movie already. I don't want to see it again."They lied," said Donald Trump in 2016, running for the Republican presidential nomination against the neo-cons in his own party who had started the "forever wars" in Afghanistan and Iraq. "They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none."
Vintage tonnage keeps Russian oil flowing
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 17/01/2025
» The name is brilliant: "vintage tonnage". It evokes 17th-century pirate vessels flying the skull-and-crossbones, 18th-century ships-of-the-line bristling with cannons, or even 19th-century clipper ships in full sail bringing tea to England and America. The images are always romantic and often beautiful.
Rambling Joe Biden officially a lost cause
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 13/07/2024
» It really doesn't matter whether Joe Biden is in peak condition intellectually during a second term as president. He did some useful things in his first term, but his main job now is to stop Donald Trump from coming back. If he succeeded in doing that and went gaga immediately afterwards, the ship of state would carry on regardless.
Iran's theocracy simply cannot go on forever
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 09/07/2024
» 'I have heard that people's zeal and interest is higher than in the first round [of Iran's presidential election]," Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told Iranian TV just before the second round of voting on Sunday. "It is wrong to assume those who abstained in the first round are opposed to Islamic rule."
Will we soon have unlimited clean energy?
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 17/12/2022
» Nuclear fusion, the "holy grail" that would finally end all the world's energy problems, has been receding into the future at the rate of about one year per year all my adult life -- it was always "about 30 years away" -- but suddenly we're catching up. Unfortunately, the change of pace comes too late to save us from an acute global climate emergency.
3 wars, 2 truces: at least some hope out there
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 07/04/2022
» Two weeks ago, the three biggest wars in the world were in Ukraine, Ethiopia and Yemen. Now truces have silenced the guns and the air strikes in two of the three. They are only temporary truces so far, but there is a reasonable chance that they could grow into something more permanent.
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").
Are we ready for the first real automatons?
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 30/01/2021
» They were planning to put on a play written by an artificial intelligence programme in Prague, capital city of the Czech Republic, this month, to mark the invention of robots (or at least the idea of robots) in the same city exactly one hundred years ago. The coronavirus pandemic got in the way of that, and it will now only be available free online late next month. Kind of symbolic, really: the future is quite different than what they expected.
No universal health care is America's loss
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 05/07/2018
» Nothing is perfect, and that definitely includes health care. On the 70th anniversary of the first full-coverage national health care system that is "free at the point of delivery", Britain's National Health Service, English people have been marching in the streets demanding better funding for the NHS, and Donald Trump naturally got the wrong end of the stick again.