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November 22, 2024
 

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Gwynne Dyer

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Gwynne Dyer
Gwynne Dyer has worked as a journalist, broadcaster and lecturer on international affairs for more than 20 years; his articles are published in 45 countries. His book, "Climate Wars," deals with the geopolitical implications of climate change and has been translated into Japanese, French, Russian, Chinese and a number of other languages.
COMMENTARY
Jul 24, 2008
Barack Obama's overseas tour
Barack Obama wants three things out of his tour of the Mideast and Europe. He wants people everywhere to think that he has the answers for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. He wants U.S. Jews to believe that he is Israel's unquestioning supporter. And he wants Americans to notice that Europeans would vote...
COMMENTARY
Jul 23, 2008
Omar al-Bashir versus the ICC
All the opposition groups in Darfur celebrated when the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court announced on July 14 that he was seeking the indictment of Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir on the charge of genocide, but almost everybody else had a problem with it. They don't doubt that al-Bashir...
COMMENTARY
Jul 16, 2008
The odds are stacked against an Iran attack
The Iranians have clearly concluded that all the American and Israeli threats to attack them are mere bluff. Israel could not destroy all of Iran's nuclear facilities unless it was willing to drop large numbers of nuclear weapons on Iran. The United States could do the job using only conventional weapons,...
COMMENTARY
Jul 9, 2008
After a century has passed, Young Turks at a crossroads
The Ottoman Empire had already been in retreat for over a century when the Young Turk revolution broke out in July, 1908. Some of the Young Turks hoped to save the whole empire; others wanted to abandon the empire and rescue an independent Turkey from the wreckage. The latter group won the argument,...
COMMENTARY
Jul 3, 2008
Malaysia: deja vu all over again
Reading the first reports of the accusations against Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, I had to check the date at the top of the page. Has there been a time slip? Is this file 10 years old?
COMMENTARY
Jun 25, 2008
Zimbabwe: opposition right to cut its losses
Morgan Tsvangirai was right to withdraw from the runoff presidential "election" in Zimbabwe on Sunday. Thousands of his supporters have been kidnapped and tortured by President Robert Mugabe's thugs since the campaign started, and 86 have been murdered already.
COMMENTARY
Jun 11, 2008
Washington and Baghdad: the treaty that isn't
In the Sherlock Holmes story "Silver Blaze," the world's most famous private detective refers to "the curious incident of the dog in the night." "But the dog did nothing in the night," replies his interlocutor. "That was the curious incident," says Holmes. The dogs aren't barking over the U.S.-Iraq treaty,...
COMMENTARY
Jun 4, 2008
Cluster bomb ban is a good start
The British armed forces clung to their cluster bombs like a baby to its rattle, and some suspected that they were trying to sabotage the treaty on behalf of their American friends. But Prime Minister Gordon Brown overruled them, in the end, and Britain was among the hundred countries that agreed to...
COMMENTARY / World
May 28, 2008
Eagerly awaiting a warmer Arctic
What connects oil at $135 a barrel with last month's discovery of huge cracks in the Ward Hunt ice shelf off Ellesmere Island at the top of Canada's Arctic archipelago? And what might connect those two things with a new, even Colder War?
COMMENTARY
May 23, 2008
It'll be Serbia's choice when the sulking stops
LONDON — The rhetoric before the Serbian parliamentary election May 11 was ugly enough, but it has gotten worse since. President Boris Tadic spun the outcome as a victory for the pro-European Union forces when only half the votes were counted, which served his purposes as he is also the leader of the...
COMMENTARY
May 14, 2008
Why Burma has been trashed for 46 years
LONDON — The Burmese regime is not to blame for the powerful cyclone that struck the Irrawaddy Delta and Yangon early this month, killing up to a hundred thousand people. But it certainly will be to blame for the next wave of deaths if aid does not soon reach the survivors.
COMMENTARY
Apr 28, 2008
A little too much help for Israel
You have to admire the macho instincts of New York Sen. Hillary Clinton. Asked on the day of the Pennsylvania primary what she would do if Iran made a nuclear attack on Israel, she replied: "If I'm the president, we will attack Iran . . . we would be able to totally obliterate them." And it's perfectly...
COMMENTARY
Apr 6, 2008
Suppose Texas was like Iraq
LONDON — Suppose the shoe were on the other foot. Suppose that the former United States had splintered into half a dozen fragments after the South won the Civil War 145 years ago.
COMMENTARY
Apr 1, 2008
A respectful Russian bluff
LONDON — In February, Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia, and most of the NATO countries recognized it. Russia condemned this as an illegal and dangerous precedent, and hinted that it might recognize other breakaway states like Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
COMMENTARY
Mar 22, 2008
Iraq after five years of war
LONDON — March 20 marked five years since U.S. President George W. Bush launched the invasion of Iraq. Can Iraq emerge from this ordeal as a place where people lead reasonably safe and happy lives?
COMMENTARY
Mar 12, 2008
Still stalled in the Middle East
LONDON — "Twenty-four hours a day of rolling news to fill," lamented the senior producer of an all-news radio station recently, "and only two hours of actual news to fill it." But his problem is minor compared to that of people condemned to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where there is now...
COMMENTARY
Mar 5, 2008
Russia is on the right path for Russians
LONDON — The coronation of Dmitri Medvedev as Vladimir Putin's anointed successor, by means of a presidential election on Sunday whose outcome was a foregone conclusion, has unleashed the usual deluge of stereotypes about "the Russians" in the Western media. They are backward, they cannot ever escape...
COMMENTARY
Feb 24, 2008
Dawning of strategic realism in Cyprus
LONDON — To call Tassos Papadopoulos a dinosaur is a slur on the entire Cretaceous era, but at least the age of the dinosaurs has ended in Cyprus. Running for re-election as president last Sunday, Papadopoulos, the man who almost single-handedly scuttled a peace settlement in Cyprus four years ago,...
COMMENTARY
Feb 14, 2008
Why is the Pentagon begging for billions?
LONDON — Last week the Pentagon asked Congress for the biggest defense budget since World War II: $515 billion, plus an additional $70 billion to cover the costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for part of the coming year. The United States is proposing to spend more on the armed forces, quite...
COMMENTARY
Feb 10, 2008
The least bad option outside U.N. rules
LONDON — The Serbian presidential election last Sunday was a near-run thing, but in the end the good guy won. Not that President Boris Tadic is all that wonderful, but he positively glows with virtue in contrast to his opponent Tomislav Nikolic, an ultra-nationalist who served as a government minister...
Two of America’s biggest debt holders are dumping Treasurys
The U.S. Treasury building in Washington. Investors in Japan and China sold a pile of U.S. debt in the last quarter, just before the U.S. presidential election.
Tokyo Metro’s overseas efforts begin in earnest with London deal
Tokyo Metro will soon have a role in the running of London's Elizabeth Line, a major train route serving the U.K.’s capital city and environs.
Russia fired experimental ballistic missile at Ukraine, Putin says
Ukrainian firefighters work on a spot following an airstrike in Dnipro on Thursday.
Ex-yokozuna Kitanofuji dies at 82
Yokozuna Kitanofuji enters the ring during the May 1970 grand sumo tournament in Tokyo.
Man charged with murder allegedly made victim date other men for money
A car carrying suspect Ryotaro Masuda, who was indicted for allegedly beating his 25-year-old girlfriend to death, leaves the Shibuya Police Station in Tokyo on Thursday.
The slow-burn success of ‘A Samurai in Time’
A 19th-century warrior gets struck by lightning and wakes to find himself in 21st-century Kyoto in Junichi Yasuda’s surprise hit “A Samurai in Time.”
Around a quarter of Japan married couples in their 20s met through dating apps
A survey released by an organization promoting “Good Couples Day” shows that 24% of couples in their 20s met their marriage partner through a dating app.
'Tokyo Swindlers': Get deep into the minds of real estate con artists
In Ko Shinjo's "Tokyo Swindlers," a group of con artists manipulates real estate giants into falsified deals within the highly competitive, quick market.
Japan, U.K. and Italy discuss inviting more countries to joint fighter project
A new concept model of a next-generation fighter jet to be jointly developed by Japan, Britain and Italy is on display in Farnborough, Hampshire, in July.
Haruki Murakami's 'The City and Its Uncertain Walls' gives deep deja vu
For “The City and Its Uncertain Walls,” translated into English by Philip Gabriel, Haruki Murakami confronts the ghosts who won't leave him alone.

Podcast

One of the many entrances to the Kabukicho neighborhood in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward.
Kabukicho: Tokyo’s ‘stadium of desire’

Longform

Construction takes place on the Takanawa Gateway Convention Center in Tokyo, slated to open in 2025.
A boom for business tourism in Japan?
By Kathryn Wortley

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