• OPINION

  After Erdogan's win, Turkey inches closer to civil war

  News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 04/11/2015

  » "You may deceive all the people part of the time, and part of the people all the time...", begins Abraham Lincoln's aphorism about democracy -- but in a multi-party democratic system, that is usually enough. In a parliamentary system like Turkey's, 49% of the popular vote gives you a comfortable majority of seats, and so Recep Tayyib Erdogan will rule Turkey for another four years. If the country lasts that long.

• OPINION

  North Korea's real nuclear deterrent

  News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 11/02/2016

  » Here we go again. North Korea launched a ballistic missile of intercontinental range on Sunday (saying it was just putting up a satellite) only weeks after it carried out its fourth nuclear weapons test (which it claimed was a hydrogen bomb). The United Nations Security Council strongly condemned it, and even the People's Republic of China, North Korea's only ally, expressed its "regret" at what the country had done.

• OPINION

  Russia's Syria mission 'accomplished' 

  News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 18/03/2016

  » He wasn't standing on an aircraft carrier with a banner saying "Mission Accomplished" behind him, but Russia's President Vladimir Putin was a lot more credible than former US president George W Bush when he declared his country's military intervention in the Middle East a success. And most of the Russian forces in Syria are going home after only five months, not the eight years that American troops stayed in Iraq.

• OPINION

  Russia was right about Syria conflict

  News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 19/05/2016

  » 'The Russians had a more realistic analysis of the situation than practically anybody else," said Lakhdar Brahimi, the former UN Special Envoy to Syria. "Everyone should have listened to the Russians a little bit more than they did."

• OPINION

  Another way of looking at the horrors of Hiroshima

  News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 26/05/2016

  » Today's Hiroshima doesn't give the TV journalists a lot to work with. It's a bustling, mid-sized Japanese city with only few reminders of its destruction by an atomic bomb in 1945. There's the skeletal dome of the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall (which was right under the blast), and discreet plaques on various buildings saying that such-and-such a middle school, with 600 students, used to be on this site, and that's all.

• OPINION

  Russia's new 'friend' is Erdogan

  News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 12/08/2016

  » There was more than a hint of grovelling in Turkish President Recep Tayyib Erdogan's approach to his new "dear friend", Russian President Vladimir Putin.

• OPINION

  Is 2016 the new 1936?

  News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 17/08/2016

  » Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce -- Karl Marx, 1852.

• OPINION

  Duterte is a problem for the Philippines, not the UN

  News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 25/08/2016

  » Rodrigo Duterte, the new president of the Philippines, gives good copy. Here's a quote from his final election rally: "Forget the laws on human rights. If I make it to the presidential palace, I will do just what I did as mayor. You drug pushers, hold-up men and do-nothings, you better go out. Because I'd kill you. I'll dump all of you into Manila Bay, and fatten all the fish there."

• OPINION

  The Korean rhetoric and its reality

  News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 13/09/2016

  » Japanese government spokesman Yoshihide Suga said that North Korea was the "neighbourhod outlaw" after Pyongyang's fifth nuclear weapons test on Friday. Barack Obama said that "The United States does not, and never will, accept North Korea as a nuclear state". Even China voiced its "firm opposition to the test". And South Korea's president, Park Gyeung-hye, accused North Korea's Dear Leader Kim Jong-un of "maniacal recklessness".

• OPINION

  No good will come from US election

  News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 02/11/2016

  » Donald Trump may not win the election next week -- although he is at least going to come close -- but even if he loses, the wells are poisoned.

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