Stories by Gwynne Dyer
Berlusconi wants to be Italy’s next president, and he might win
Silvio Berlusconi governed Italy as prime minister three times between 1994 and 2011 at the head of various coalitions, for a total of nine years. Italy’s economy and reputation were in steady decline the whole time.
There is reason to suspect that the original Green hostility to nuclear power was encouraged and subsidised by the U.S. fossil fuel industry, which has always been quick to spot potential rivals and sabotage them.
The party’s promise to overtake the U.S. economy and make China the world’s dominant power will probably never come to pass, nor will its promise to raise Chinese living standards to a developed-world level.
The assumption in every case—French, American, and British—is that populist demagogues are now easier to beat than traditional right-wing politicians. Maybe that’s true, but all three countries are a long way from Chile.
Give Putin no concessions, but show him respect. Keep talking to him, and eventually he’ll come down from the ledge he’s gone out on at the moment.
The Chilean electorate is clearly in a volatile mood, but fewer than half of them bothered to vote in the first round of the presidential election last month. They were waiting for the second round.
If we can actually replace the world’s entire energy infrastructure in a single generation without even a major war or famine, I would gladly revise my views on the evolutionary fitness of the human race.
Putin wants a written promise that Ukraine will never join the Western alliance. NATO countries would never allow it anyway, precisely because there is some risk that it could drag them into a war with Russia.Author
It’s not absolutely foolproof, but it has protected us all from nuclear war for 75 years.
Rich countries are punishing the economies of the poor by imposing knee-jerk travel bans on an entire region of Africa on suspicion of harbouring the Omicron virus—even though it's already confirmed in Europe and Asia.
It would be colossally stupid for Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine, and he is not a stupid man. He would end up occupying a country of 45 million people most of whom resent the Russian occupation.
Long-range, million-dollar drones have been killing people remotely for more than a decade, but those are big aircraft making big explosions and they usually avoid densely populated urban areas. 
When the EU announced last month a further round of sanctions on the Lukashenko regime for the migrant caper, the president spun out even further. But Russia’s response gives him little room to move.
What two weeks together arguing about climate issues did for the key delegates at Glasgow was to create a pressure-cooker atmosphere in which hard positions softened and movement finally became possible.
So the scientists, and the rest of us too, walk a fine line between hope and despair, with occasional bursts of silent rage. But that is the human condition.
What right do Western countries have to hold onto money until Afghanistan proves it won’t be 'a haven for terrorism?' How could the Taliban prove it won’t become one, and how long would that take? 
China’s test of a hypersonic missile virtually guarantees extra funding for the American version. Russia already has a more or less operational hypersonic missile, and India and North Korea are working on them.
Nigeria and Ethiopia, the two most populous countries on the continent, are both stumbling towards disintegration.
More than 100 world leaders and 25,000 delegates will attend the COP26 global climate summit in Glasgow later this month. 
The settlements Greenland that the Norse at L’Anse aux Meadows came from had been founded in AD 985, with probably fewer than a thousand Norse in Greenland in 1021, writes Gwynne Dyer. 
Five years ago, Lebanon still looked like a middle-class country with a lot of poor people. Now, it looks like a very poor country with a few rich people.
European Union authorities suspect that Johnson is seeking an excuse to blow up the treaty so that he can scapegoat the Europeans for the ensuing trade war and renewed war in Northern Ireland.
A Polish court has ruled its law is superior to EU law, while the country’s right-wing Law and Justice Party is drifting into troubled waters amid populist government upheaval in the European Union.
What could deter an attack? The certainty that even if the United States could not intervene militarily in time to save Taiwan, it would certainly institute a complete naval blockade of China immediately afterwards.
But there will eventually be another collapse on La Palma and then a tsunami, maybe tomorrow, maybe in 100,000 years or so. That’s how these islands work. 
Intelligence services reflexively build bureaucratic empires and ceaselessly expand their reach because that’s what bureaucracies do. They can be useful in war, but the bulk of what they do in peacetime is pointless.
You can’t carbon-date footprints in the mud, but you can date the ditch grass seeds that are trapped in the mud (now turned into rock) in the layers just above and below those footprints.
‘Containing’ China is just as much the focus of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue as ‘containing’ the Soviet Union was when the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) was founded 72 years ago. 
However the electoral arithmetic works out, it will likely lead to much commotion but not much change in keeping with the sane and undramatic politics of Germany.
AUKUS (rhymes with ‘caucus’), which has been cobbled together since the fall of Kabul last month to draw attention away from the shambles attending the American retreat from Afghanistan.
A significant proportion of Republican voters are striving to remove themselves from the gene pool by refusing to be vaccinated, and they can’t vote Republican if they are dead. 
Did the world change forever? No, it barely budged. 9/11 was a deliberate provocation and the United States fell for it hook, line and sinker, but it still didn’t produce any of the changes the perpetrators wanted.