Pressure campaign in London

Recently: “They say criminals always return to the scene of the crime.” Why has the governing body of international football given the president of the United States a peace prize?

Today: Ukraine has ruled out trading territory for peace. Trump wants a deal. European leaders are offering solidarity but little else. It’s all looking less like negotiation than an ultimatum: Accept what Kyiv considers capitulation, or take the blame when talks collapse.

+ For members: What does owning America’s most valuable media properties actually get you? Michael Socolow on the challenges and limits of billionaire influence.

& New music from Sarathy Korwar ...

No deal on Donbas

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy ruled out surrendering territory to Russia on Monday. No swapping the occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant for parts of Donetsk still under Ukrainian control. No concessions to speed up talks. “Under our laws, under international law—and under moral law—we have no right to give anything away,” he said after meeting European leaders in London.

Washington isn’t happy. Over the weekend, President Donald Trump accused Zelenskyy of not reading the U.S. peace proposal. His son suggested Washington might walk away entirely. The Kremlin welcomed Trump’s new national security strategy. European leaders offered support but little else; French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz didn’t stay long.

With all the war’s shifting uncertainties, two things seem to be getting clearer here: First, there’s no unified position: Zelenskyy says Washington, Kyiv, and Moscow have fundamentally different views on Donbas, and Trump’s envoys met Putin before consulting Ukraine. Second, Kyiv’s leverage is eroding fast—Russian forces keep advancing, American patience is thinning, and European backing without Washington doesn’t count for much. Zelenskyy isn’t hedging or signaling flexibility. That’s either conviction or a calculation that any territorial deal would be politically fatal at home, regardless of what Trump wants. The peace process, such as it is, increasingly looks less like negotiation than a pressure campaign—with Ukraine being squeezed to accept terms it considers capitulation, or take the blame when talks collapse.

Meanwhile

• Mean streets. Paramount launched a hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery on Monday, going directly to shareholders with a US$108 billion offer after Netflix announced an $83 billion deal for much of the company on Friday. Paramount ’s CEO, David Ellison, called Netflix’s board-approved agreement “an inferior proposal” facing regulatory headwinds. At the Kennedy Center Honors on Sunday, Trump noted Netflix’s “very big market share” and said he’d be “involved” in any regulatory review—raising questions about which deal, if either, survives antitrust scrutiny. … See “All the reach in the world.”
• Airstrikes over the border. Thailand launched airstrikes against Cambodia on Monday after border clashes killed one Thai soldier and four Cambodian civilians, with both sides blaming the other for breaking an October ceasefire brokered by Trump in Kuala Lumpur with Malaysia’s Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim. Thailand has evacuated 385,000 civilians from border areas; Cambodia has moved 1,100 families. Cross-border airstrikes between Southeast Asian nations are extraordinarily rare. The Trump-brokered peace deal, signed barely two months ago, now appears close to collapse.
• ‘The Fourth Reich.’ The European Union fined Elon Musk’s X €120 million on Friday for misleading blue checkmarks and ad-transparency failures—the first penalty under the bloc’s Digital Services Act. Musk responded by comparing the EU with Nazi Germany and calling for its abolition. X then deleted the European Commission’s advertising account on Saturday. U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President J.D. Vance, criticized the EU for targeting American companies. The confrontation appears to be an escalation from a regulatory dispute to something closer to a diplomatic incident.
• The trillion-dollar pivot. China’s trade surplus topped US$1 trillion for the first time on Monday, according to the country’s General Administration of Customs, even as exports to the United States plunged 28.6 percent for the eighth consecutive month. Beijing offset the American decline by routing goods elsewhere: EU-bound shipments rose 14.8 percent, Australia 35.8 percent, Southeast Asia 8.2 percent. The $1.08 trillion surplus through November already exceeds last year’s full-year total. Macron warned over the weekend that Europe may follow Washington in imposing tariffs if the imbalance persists. In the meantime, factory activity contracted for an eighth straight month.
• Liberation Day’s long shadow. A year to the day since the former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad fled Damascus, President Ahmed al-Sharaa led a military parade on Monday—wearing the same combat uniform from his entrance into the capital, a choice his advisers called deliberate. The former rebel commander has spent the year consolidating power: no elections scheduled, no constitution drafted, abuses against Alawites and other minorities documented. Human Rights Watch warned this week that the window for a freer, more accountable Syria is closing.

For members

All the reach in the world

What does owning America’s most valuable media properties actually get you? Michael Socolow on the challenges and limits of billionaire influence.

On Monday, December 8, Paramount launched a hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery—a US$108 billion offer that went straight to shareholders, bypassing the board that had just approved an $83 billion deal with Netflix. If successful, the Ellison family would add CNN, HBO, and the Warner Bros. studio to a media portfolio that already includes CBS, MTV, Comedy Central, and a major stake in TikTok’s American operations.

It’s a remarkable shopping spree. David Ellison’s Paramount spent some US$150 million just on The Free Press, the digital publication founded by Bari Weiss. His father, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, is part of the consortium that acquired TikTok’s U.S. business from Beijing-based ByteDance in a deal blessed by the White House—a deal Project Liberty and other opponents are fighting in court. The world’s second-richest person now stands to control platforms reaching hundreds of millions of Americans.

But the Ellisons aren’t operating in a vacuum. Elon Musk owns X. Mark Zuckerberg controls Facebook and Instagram. Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post. A few ultra-wealthy American businessmen have consolidated their hold over a vast range of media properties. Meanwhile, the emergence of Substack, podcasts, and countless online outlets has fragmented the sources Americans actually get their news from.

So how much does it actually matter that a few billionaires own so many media companies?

Michael Socolow is a professor of communication and journalism at the University of Maine. Socolow sees something counterintuitive in the Ellison family’s acquisitions: not a sign that billionaires are consolidating control over American media, but that they’re consolidating control over the most valuable media companies—properties whose audiences have shrunk dramatically but whose relative worth has soared. But reaching Americans isn’t the same as persuading them. And while we may overestimate the media’s power over politics, we may be underestimating politics’ power over the media …

New music

‘Is There Beauty?’

Sarathy Korwar is a London-based drummer, producer, and percussionist who is, as he puts it, “pursuing the melodic possibilities within the drum ensemble”: tablas, Southern Indian clay-pot ghatams, kit drums, bells, xylophones, vocal drones, and a Buchla Music Easel. Swirling, layered, and, yes, melodic—somewhere between minimalist contemporary classical and jazz, and yet its own thing entirely.