Free Republic

It was a piece of news so obscure and implausible that I missed it when it first surfaced last month. The news was that the Russians are going to put hypersonic nuclear missiles into Nicaragua and terrify the Americans into backing down over Ukraine. Or kill them all if they don’t.“If American missile systems can nearly reach Moscow from Ukrainian territory, it’s time for Russia to roll out something powerful closer to the American ‘city on a hill,’” Olga Skabeyeva said on the news show on “Rossiya-1,” the most popular Russian TV channel.Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega published a decree last...

It is a hard fact that the centre of gravity of Israeli politics is now far to the Right, and still moving rightwards. This will remain so, with or without ‘Bibi’ There was a tempest in a small teapot recently, as Human Rights Watch (HRW) accused Israel of apartheid. That echoed the views of the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, which said in January that the current Israeli Government is an “apartheid regime.” But the official response was different. The Israeli Government ignored B’Tselem, but its Washington Embassy gave HRW the standard response to foreign criticism: “We strongly reject the...

Claims that global warming can drive civil unrest are hotly disputed. In his popular 2008 book Climate Wars, the US journalist and military historian Gwynne Dyer laid out a daunting scenario. Climate change would put growing pressure on fresh water and food over the coming century, he wrote, triggering social disorder, mass migration and violent conflict. But is there real proof of a link between climate change and civil war — particularly in crisis-ridden parts of Africa — as many have claimed? No, says Halvard Buhaug, a political scientist with the Peace Research Institute Oslo in Norway. In research published...

'The United States needs to lose this war in Iraq as soon as possible. Even more urgently, the whole world needs the United States to lose the war in Iraq.'Author Gwynne Dyer explains how we havent grasped that the world has changed, that we aren't living in our old superpower world anymore, one in which we are the leader of the forces of light against the evil dark powers of communism.Nor are we, in fact, even a military superpower in the way we like to think we are; in reality, our military machine can only be used by weak countries....

2004 Year-Ender By Gwynne Dyer The world has been on hold this year. Interesting and important things have happened in many countries, and most people have scarcely noticed that international politics is becalmed - but it is. The normal business of the planet has pretty much slowed to a halt and we are all gently drifting downstream together while we wait to see what becomes of the United States - and, as a result, of the rest of the world, for the US is still a key player in almost every game. We may be waiting some time. The war...

History has been derailed. It was chugging along quite satisfactorily until the end of 2000: the Cold War long over, no threat of a major war anywhere, democracy spreading even to the most unexpected places by nonviolent means and a growing commitment to multilateralism in all the major powers. Now there is a great and greatly exaggerated fear of terrorism, American troops rule over 50 million deeply unhappy Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq, the 55-year-old NATO alliance is starting to come apart under the strain and even the United Nations is at risk. Was the world bound to end up...