Showing 1 - 10 of 10
South Asian nuclear war would hit globe
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 01/05/2025
» India and Pakistan have had several shooting matches since they carried out a total of nine underground nuclear weapons tests in 1998. However, they don't make Putin-style thinly veiled threats to use their nukes (around 170 nuclear warheads each at the moment), and they do understand that escalation from smaller, "conventional" wars is the real danger.
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.
India at 75, and what might have been
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 20/08/2022
» Last Tuesday, on the 75th anniversary of Indian independence, Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised to turn India into a developed country within the next 25 years. If all goes well, that could actually come to pass, but it would have to go very well indeed.
Lebanon quickly sinking in more ways than one
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 21/10/2021
» Off the Lebanese coast about 60 kilometres north of Beirut a 104-metre battleship stands vertically, with her bow and some 30 metres of her length plunged into the mud. The seabed is 140 metres down, but you can even scuba-dive on the stern if you are a technical diver. The ship is a bit like Lebanon, for reasons I'll explain later.
Ethiopia: War in Tigray still a tricky prospect
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 02/12/2020
» 'Love always wins. Killing others is a defeat," said Ethiopia's Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed in June 2018, shortly after surviving a grenade attack at a rally in Meskel Square in the capital, Addis Ababa. How was he to know that just thirty months after saying that he would have to stop loving and start killing?
Lebanon was cursed even before the blast
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 13/08/2020
» Beirut has been living with car bombs and air raids on a sporadic but continuing basis for so long that it would probably make sense to rebuild this time with shatterproof glass. The torrent of broken glass falling from a thousand shattered buildings probably accounted for half the 158 dead found so far in Beirut and certainly for most of the 6,000 wounded.
Tribalism fuels today's politics
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 15/11/2019
» 'Homo economicus" is dead. Long live "homo tribuarius"!
Kashmir: The 'wounded civilisation' strikes back
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 09/08/2019
» God knows what novelist V S Naipaul really meant half a century ago when he called India "the wounded civilisation" in his travelogue-cum-psychoanalysis book about the home of his ancestors. But it is a handy phrase, because it encapsulates the vision that drove Prime Minister Narendra Modi to destroy the deal that bound Kashmir to India on Monday.
A journalist's funeral in Ireland reignites deadly past
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 26/04/2019
» On Wednesday, the Taoiseach (prime minister) of the Republic of Ireland, Leo Varadkar, and Prime Minister Theresa May of the United Kingdom, both showed up in Belfast in Northern Ireland for the funeral of a young woman called Lyra McKee. So did the president of the Republic, Michael Higgins and UK opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn. It's quite possible that none of them had even heard of her a week ago.
Brexit heads to climax over Irish border
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 03/11/2018
» It was either ignorant or irresponsible for those campaigning for Brexit (British exit from the European Union) two years ago to claim that the Irish border would not be a problem. In fact, it may lead to a catastrophic "no deal" Brexit in which the United Kingdom crashes out of the EU without an agreement of any kind.