UKRAINE

A "peace plan" written in Washington and Moscow, and handed to the victim to sign

A 28-point American plan to end the war leaked this fortnight, and it read, to Kyiv and its allies, less like a peace than a capitulation: Ukrainian territory ceded, its army capped, its NATO hopes ended, its future dictated by the two powers negotiating over its head. Europe scrambled to soften it. The victim was told to be grateful.

A plan to end the war in Ukraine, drafted by the American administration in close consultation with Moscow, emerged this fortnight and landed in Kyiv like a blow. Its 28 points, as leaked, amounted to something close to Russia's maximum demands: Ukraine would cede territory it still holds, cap the size of its army, abandon its aspiration to join NATO, and accept a settlement negotiated substantially over its head between Washington and Moscow, with Europe and Ukraine itself relegated to accepting terms shaped by the two great powers. To Kyiv and its European allies, it read not as a peace but as a capitulation dressed as one, a reward to the aggressor for its aggression, and the imposition on the victim of terms it would never freely accept, under the threat that American support, already withdrawn once, would vanish entirely if it refused. Frantic diplomacy in Geneva produced a revised, somewhat softened version, and the negotiations churned on, but the message of the original draft was clear: the fate of Ukraine would be decided by the powerful, and the country whose blood had been spilled for four years would be handed the result to sign.

It was the culmination of the reversal this paper has tracked all year, the transactional presidency's approach to the war reaching its logical end: peace defined not as justice or security for the invaded but as a deal between great powers, in which the aggressor is rewarded, the victim is pressured, and the outcome is measured by whether the fighting stops, not by whether the settlement is just or durable. Whether Ukraine could be forced to accept it, whether Europe could soften it enough to be survivable, whether Russia would honour any deal it signed, remained unresolved. But the spectacle of a plan to end a war of aggression that rewarded the aggressor and dictated terms to the victim was a fitting emblem of an order in which strength is honoured and principle is a luxury, and in which the difference between a peace and a capitulation is a distinction the powerful no longer trouble to make.

HONG KONG

A tower burns, and the scaffolding was the fuel

A catastrophic fire tore through a high-rise residential complex in Hong Kong on November 26, killing more than 150 people in one of the deadliest fires the city has ever seen. The blaze spread with terrifying speed up the exterior of the towers, and the reason was a familiar and preventable one: the buildings were wrapped in bamboo scaffolding and netting for renovation, and the highly flammable materials, along with foam sealing that failed to meet safety standards, turned the exteriors into a chimney that carried the fire up and across the complex faster than anyone could escape. Arrests followed, of the contractors responsible for the materials, and the questions were, wearily, this paper's questions: why the flammable materials, why the failed inspections, why the warnings about exactly this risk had not prevented exactly this catastrophe.

IN BRIEF

A shooting near the White House; the files forced out; a new model

A National Guard member was shot and killed near the White House on November 26 by an Afghan national who had entered the country years earlier, an attack the administration seized upon to intensify its already sweeping immigration crackdown and to suspend asylum processing. Congress forced the release of the Epstein investigative files after overwhelming bipartisan votes, a rare defeat for a president whose own supporters had demanded transparency. And Google released Gemini 3, its most capable AI model yet, widely judged to have leapt ahead of its rivals, a reminder that beneath the year's political chaos the technology's advance never paused.

The Column

A peace that rewards the war is a lesson, not a settlement

A plan to end the war in Ukraine, written in Washington and Moscow and handed to the victim to sign, rewards the country that started it. The objection is not that this is unjust, though it is. The objection is that it does not end wars. It schedules them.

By Zainab Zaheer

A "peace plan" for Ukraine took shape this fortnight, drafted by the powerful and presented to the invaded as something between an offer and an order, and its essential feature is that it rewards the aggressor, ratifying seized territory, relieving the pressure that the aggression earned, and asking the victim to sign away what was taken by force. The usual objection to such a peace is moral, that it is unjust, that it betrays the wronged party, and that objection is correct as far as it goes. But I want to make the colder objection, the one that a hard-nosed realist who cares nothing for justice should still be forced to answer, which is that a peace which rewards aggression does not actually do the thing peace is supposed to do. It does not end the war. It teaches a lesson, and the lesson guarantees the next one.

John Maynard Keynes made exactly this argument in 1919, not from sentiment but from a ruthless clarity about consequences, when he looked at the peace imposed at Versailles and predicted, in precise and unheeded detail, that a settlement structured around punishment and humiliation and economic ruin would not secure peace but incubate the next war, because a peace is not merely the termination of the present conflict but the setting of the terms on which the future will run, and terms that plant grievance and reward force are terms that grow war. He was right, catastrophically and on schedule, within twenty years. The mechanism I am pointing at is the mirror image of his but the logic is identical: where Versailles bred the next war by punishing the defeated too harshly, this peace breeds the next war by rewarding the aggressor too well, and both fail for the same underlying reason, that a settlement is not just an ending but a precedent, a public demonstration to every watching state of what force does and does not achieve, and the world learns from the demonstration whatever the demonstration actually teaches, regardless of what the peacemakers intended.

Let me give the strongest version of the case for signing anyway, because it is not a cynical case and the people making it are not fools or villains. The killing is real and ongoing, the objection runs; every day the war continues, people die who would live under even an unjust peace; the victim is losing and will lose more; and to prolong the slaughter in the name of a just settlement that superior force will never permit is to sacrifice real lives to an abstraction, to let the perfect murder the possible. Idealism, on this account, is a luxury paid for in other people's blood, and a leader who refuses a bad peace to hold out for a good one that cannot be had is indulging principle at the cost of the very people principle claims to serve. I feel the weight of this fully, and I will not pretend the alternative to a bad peace is a costless good one; it is often more dying. But Keynes's point survives even this, because the choice is not really between a bad peace now and a good peace later; it is between a bad peace now that ends this war while scheduling the next, and a harder road that might secure a peace that actually holds, and the accounting that counts only the lives saved today, and not the lives the lesson will cost tomorrow, is not hard-nosed realism. It is realism with too short a horizon, which is only sentimentality wearing armour.

I write from a part of the world that has been handed many peaces of this kind, settlements drafted elsewhere and presented to us to sign, that stopped a war on terms rewarding whoever held the power, and were praised in distant capitals as pragmatism while we understood, immediately, that we had been handed not a settlement but a lesson, and the lesson was that our borders and our rights held exactly as long as someone stronger found it convenient. I have watched those peaces teach exactly what they were structured to teach, and I have watched the next war arrive as their pupil, and I have watched the same powers that drafted them express the same surprise at their failure. So the pedagogy of a peace is not abstract to me. It is the water I grew up in.

And that is the whole of my argument, made to the realist and not to the idealist, because the idealist already agrees and the realist is the one who needs it: a peace that rewards the aggressor is not a soft-hearted mistake, it is a hard-headed one, because it purchases the end of this war at the price of teaching every state with an appetite for its neighbour's land that appetite is rewarded, force is ratified, and borders belong to whoever will seize them and wait for the powerful to draft the paper. That lesson will be studied. It is being studied now, in every capital with a grievance and an army, and it will be applied, and when it is, the authors of this peace will call the next war a tragedy, a shock, a thing no one could have foreseen. Keynes foresaw it in 1919. It is not hard to foresee. You need only ask what a settlement teaches, and then remember that the students always, eventually, do their homework.

The Ledger

Google's Gemini 3 leaping ahead is a reminder that the technology's advance is relentless regardless of the political turmoil; the models keep improving while the governance keeps eroding, widening the gap this paper has warned of all year.

Data centers & power

The build-out continues beneath the geopolitics; the power question endures. Gemini 3's capabilities imply yet more compute, yet more energy, the demand curve bending ever upward.

Rates

The Fed is expected to cut again in December; the economy, cooled but not broken, continues its strange resilient drift through a year of chaos, propped increasingly, as this paper will note, by AI investment itself.

Real estate

US 30-year mortgage 6.19 percent (November 26), the year's low. The easing that has been 2025's one consistent comfort continues into the winter.

India tech

The Ukraine settlement's message, that aggression is rewarded and alliances are conditional, reinforces India's instinct for strategic autonomy: in a world where the powerful reward force and abandon the principled, depending on no single patron looks ever wiser from Delhi.

What we called wrong

Nothing to retract. The Ukraine plan extends the Alaska column's argument to the war's conclusion: a peace that rewards aggression is not a peace but a lesson, taught to every watching aggressor, about what force can be made to earn.

The Back Page

The bamboo chimney

More than 150 people died in Hong Kong this fortnight because the buildings they lived in had been wrapped, for renovation, in bamboo scaffolding and flammable netting and foam that turned the exteriors into a chimney. It is worth stating the horror plainly and then stating the thing beneath it, which is the thing this paper states in almost every issue: it was preventable, and it was foreseen. The dangers of flammable scaffolding netting and substandard building materials in high-rise renovation are not obscure; they are the subject of safety codes, of inspections, of warnings, of previous fires elsewhere that taught exactly this lesson. And in this case, arrests of contractors followed within days, on allegations that the materials used did not meet the required standards, that corners were cut, that the flammable was used where the fire-resistant was mandated, to save money, as corners are always cut to save money, on the assumption that the fire that the standards exist to prevent would not, this time, come. It came. It went up the bamboo chimney faster than the residents could flee, and it killed 150 of them in their homes, in a wealthy, modern, sophisticated city, because someone, to save some money, used the flammable material the rules forbade, betting that the catastrophe the rules exist to prevent would not happen on their building. This is the oldest story this paper tells, and it does not get less enraging with repetition: the safety rule that costs money now against a disaster that feels abstract until it arrives, the corner cut on the bet that this time will be fine, the warning ignored, the preventable catastrophe that duly, predictably, arrives and kills the people the rule was written to protect. 150 people, in their homes, up a bamboo chimney that should never have been there. The rules existed. Someone decided they were too expensive to follow. The fire did not care.