Stories by Gwynne Dyer
Lebanon is sinking
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. Author
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.
Income disparities in the United States have been widening years, as they have in China, with grave social consequences for both. But being democratic doesn’t enable the U.S. to deal with it any better. Maybe it’s just a
The final ignominious departure of Western military forces does not signify an increased risk of international terrorist attacks from Afghanistan.
Ethiopia's prime minister, Abiy Ahmed is rolling the dice and hoping to build a rapidly expanded army that will reconquer Tigray, where almost half of the country’s army was based.
What impact will commercial space tourism have on greenhouse gas emissions? It may come down to engineering.
Even with the help of Western invasions and the War on Terror, the Islamists have been unable to convince enough Arabs that they are the right solution to the Arab world’s problems.
The United States has fallen into the habit of frittering its strength away in non-strategic wars against countries that do not really threaten it. This ultimately undermines American power.
Not much in history is inevitable, but the conquest of the Americas was. 
The really unpardonable mistake in Afghanistan was forgetting all the lessons Western armies had learned from a dozen lost guerilla wars in former colonies between 1954 and 1975.
The business elite and the whole middle class are in a flat panic with the election of new president Pedro Castillo, who has a steep learning curve ahead.
We call it democracy now, and it certainly does not mean absolute equality. It does mean that the differences of wealth and power must not become too great, or the whole structure of consent will collapse.
Vital new technologies, from mobile phones and computers to batteries for electric vehicles and energy storage, have now created a huge demand for cobalt, nickel, copper, manganese and rare earths. 
We are entering a period where big political and behavioural changes are possible, and we need to take maximum advantage of it.
Even as the British population leads the way in vaccinations, now might not be the time for brave experiments with dropping all pandemic restrictions
The mills of American justice grind even more slowly than those of the South African courts, but the time is coming when Trump will be charged with a serious offence. When that happens, he will do a Zuma.
All the explanations on offer for the death of Jovenel Moise are incredible. Assassins without an escape plan, who according to the security cameras arrived at 2:40 a.m., an hour and a half after Moïse was killed? 
Kabul may fall in a lot less than six months. The Taliban already hold at least half the country and they are currently taking new districts literally every day.
This is all quite new science, and still open to challenge. But over the past two decades the same pattern of seven stalled peaks and lows over the same regions–‘wave-7’–has lasted seven times for more than two weeks. 
Ethiopia can survive losing Tigray, but the wholesale disintegration of Africa’s second-biggest country would be an almost limitless disaster. 
China was a horrendously impoverished and unequal society in 1921, the official line says, and owes its current prosperity and freedom from foreign rule to the Communist revolution of 1949–but in reality, it had little t
If the Democrats do not resurrect some version of the Voting Rights Act, then the new electoral machinery being installed by the Republican Party will guarantee that it wins the presidential elections of 2024.