Profile of Gwynne Dyer

All articles of Gwynne Dyer

• Political foes in Ukraine eye election
  The brawl in the Ukrainian parliament last Tuesday was an undignified ending to the country's two-month political crisis but something important ...
• The threat of green Obama
  President-elect Barack Obama has inherited the in-box from hell but you could practically smell the fear in some other quarters as he listed his ...
• Taiwan-China: porcupines on a first date
  Mating is a notoriously tricky business for porcupines, but even the first date is an awkward transaction. Likewise for prickly customers like ...
• Crash: the second time as farce
  This is not the Crash of 1929 revisited and we are not heading into a second Great Depression. No developed country this time round is going to ...
• Selective compensation is the rule of the game
  Libya was the diplomatic crossroads of the planet last week, with Condoleezza Rice making the first visit by a U.S. Secretary of State in 55 ...
• Climate change: the nature of the evidence
  If Hurricane Gustav had struck New Orleans with full force, what would that have told us about the scale and speed of climate change? If more of ...
• An Obama-Biden foreign policy
  Barack Obama, we are told, chose Joe Biden to be his running mate because he needed an older man, more experienced in foreign policy, to fill the ...
• Are we on the brink of the breaking of NATO?
  NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is a remarkable case of institutional survival in the face of changing circumstances. It was ...
• South Ossetia: A monumental miscalculation
  The war in South Ossetia is essentially over, and the Georgians have lost. This was Georgia's second attempt in 18 years to conquer the ...
• Malaysia: deja vu all over again
  Reading the first reports about the accusations against Malaysia's opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim, I had to check the date at the top of the ...
• Zimbabwe: cutting the losses
  There is no Plan B. Morgan Tsvangirai was right to withdraw from the run-off presidential "election" in Zimbabwe on Sunday, because there's no ...
• Instead of oil there is algae from ponds
  "Today we witness a very great change for hydrocarbons," said Alexei Miller, head of Russian oil and gas giant Gazprom, last week. "The (oil ...
• South Africa and the unskilled immigrants
  It was looking ugly there for a few days, with mobs of South Africans in townships around Johannesburg randomly murdering several dozen ...
• The Burmese, as usual, are on their own
  The Burmese regime is not to blame for the powerful cyclone that struck the Irrawaddy delta and Rangoon early this month, killing up to 100,00 ...
• Oil prices: another prediction
  Last week Hamish McRae, one of the world's best economic journalists, declared in The Independent that "Hardly anyone a year ago successfully ...
• Nepalese Maoists intent on developing prosperity
  Unless the early election returns are completely misleading, Nepal will soon have the first freely elected Maoist government in history. This ...
• Zimbabwe: The nature of Mugabes power
  It has been a vivid demonstration of how power really works. A week ago, Robert Mugabe was still the undisputed ruler of Zimbabwe. He was 84, and ...
• Tibetan independence: the window is not open
  The monks who marched through Lhasa on March 10 to mark the anniversary of the Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule in 1959 did not want to ...
• Will there be a war in South America?
  Something strange happens to the roads in eastern Colombia. As you near the Venezuelan border, you suddenly come across long, dead-straight ...
• Imad Mughniyehs killing: wheels within wheels
  Imad Mughniyeh didn't have long to be surprised, for the bomb that exploded in the car parked next to his undoubtedly killed him in less than a ...
• Half a trillion for defence: against whom?
  Last week the Pentagon asked Congress for the biggest defence budget since the Second World War: $515 billion, plus an additional $70 billion to ...
• Climate change: panic in the trenches
  It's an old joke: everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. The same, unfortunately, is true for the climate. They ...
• Class struggle in Thailand
  The Thai army hasn't the faintest idea what to do next. Sixteen months ago, after weeks of anti-government demonstrations by opposition party ...
• Opposition to the Nano: hypocrisy at its highest
  The jokes about the Nano, Tata Motors' new affordable car for the Indian middle class, were harmless, although very old. They told the same ...
• The world in 2007 wasnt all that bad
  2007 was the year in which global warming finally began to be taken seriously. The climate change deniers were in full retreat, and the ...
• Occupied Somalia: more are doomed to die
  It is a year on Friday since Somalia's capital, Mogadishu, fell to Ethiopian troops and the occupation has been one of the most brutal on record. ...
• Bali climate change talks were inspiring
  Do not be downhearted about the outcome of the Bali talks. They did not deliver the binding commitments to cuts in greenhouse gas emissions that ...
• U.S. dollar: the long and winding fall has begun
  It's just straws in the wind so far. India's Ministry of Culture announces that foreign tourists can no longer pay in dollars when visiting the ...
• Climate change edges way into Australias election
  John Howard has been prime minister of Australia for 11 years, and by normal political standards he has done almost everything right. The country ...
• Telling the truth about the supply of petroleum
  If a diplomat is "an honest man sent abroad to lie for the good of his country" (Sir Henry Wotton, 1612), then oil industry executives used to be ...