Gwynne Dyer

Much commotion but not much change as the most trusted politician in Germany steps down Last January Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) were ahead in the German opinion polls ...

Eugenics was a 20th-century pseudo-science that purported to improve the human breed by weeding out the ‘least fit’, often by measures like compulsory sterilisation or, in the case of the ...

By Gwynne Dyer ‘Changed the world forever’ is the most hackneyed phrase in journalism, and if you can get through this week (the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks) without hearing ...

Afghanistan withdrawal has strengthened rather than ended the West’s delusional thinking that led to the misbegotten adventure in the first place By Gwynne Dyer A man is sitting in ...

Violent Islamist movements, as current events in Afghanistan demonstrate, have had some success in Muslim countries that have been invaded by the United States. But they have failed everywhere else, ...

There are 150 new coal-fired plants under construction or already approved and funded in the world, so you can’t really say that we are taking global warming seriously yet. But ...

By Gwynne Dyer “I will never kneel before such a destructive force (as the Taliban),” declared Ashraf Ghani, the soon-to-be-ex-president of Afghanistan. “We will either sit knee-to-knee for real negotiations ...

At first I was going to write about the ‘Arab Problem’, because there is not a single functioning democracy in the Arab world. This week’s presidential coup in Tunisia ...

The extreme weather events of recent weeks have become a further wake-up call ‘Zeitgeist’ is a slippery word. At best it’s just a fancy German way of saying ‘the ...

By Gwynne Dyer Five times in the past two weeks, government soldiers in Badakhshan and Takhar provinces in northern Afghanistan have fled across the border into Tajikistan after clashes with ...

First the ‘heat dome’, with temperatures in the mid-to-high forties Celsius in many parts of western North America for up to a week (49.6°C in Lytton, BC). Then, when the ...

At the recent G7 summit, US president Joe Biden promised to distribute 500 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines free to the poorer countries by the middle of next year. That’s ...

The hope and/or fear that ‘aliens are among us’ had its heyday in the 1950s but is making a comeback By Gwynne Dyer The silly season has come early ...

It’s not Bretton Woods, but it’s a start. The decision by the finance ministers of the G7 countries to create a global minimum tax rate on corporate profits ...

“I see a huge and growing gap between the rhetoric and the reality,” said Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency, two weeks ago, but he despaired a bit ...

Poland’s Prime Minister Mateus Morawiecki condemned the “hijacking” of the Ryanair jet on the orders of Belarus’ President Alexander Lukashenko on Sunday, accusing him of a “reprehensible act of ...

The birth rates are falling fast in all the world’s more prosperous countries, but the generation now in their middle years have not yet grasped what that means for ...

By Gwynne Dyer ‘Objective allies’ generally don’t even talk to each other. They don’t have common values, their ultimate goals may be completely incompatible, they often hate each ...

People often compare him to Hitler, yet it’s not only the French who see him in a positive light Napoleon Bonaparte doesn’t come up much in conversation these ...

A tempest in a small teapot this week, as Human Rights Watch (HRW) accused Israel of ‘apartheid’. That echoed the judgement of the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, which ...

You can tuck your head between your knees and kiss your target of ‘not-more-than-1.5-degrees-Celsius-warming’ goodbye. Trump is out and Biden is in, and you will hear a lot of ...

‘Rounding into the home stretch, it’s Italy by a full length, then the United Kingdom, with the United States and Brazil neck and neck…. No, wait. Brazil is making ...

By Gwynne Dyer “If they go, we’ll all have to go. That’s the reality of it,” said a British source about President Joe Biden’s announcement that the ...

We’re safe from Iran’s nuclear weapons which never existed anyway, but what about the others? First, the good news. The United States and Iran had talks in Vienna ...