Two names, no plan

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

Today: Zelenskyy laid out Washington’s latest peace terms on Thursday—then said it’s not up to him whether to accept them. What’s going on?

+ For members: Why is European innovation-led growth so low? Andrea Lorenzo Capussela’s new book, The Republic of Innovation: A New Political Economy of Freedom.

& New music from Joey Waronker ...

No map, no governance

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described Washington’s territorial compromise on Thursday: Ukrainian troops withdraw from Donetsk Oblast, Russian troops refrain from entering, and the area becomes something both sides have a name for but neither has explained. The Americans call it a “free economic zone.” Russians call it a “demilitarized zone.” No one has yet proposed who’d govern, police, or administer it.

Then Zelenskyy distanced himself from the whole thing. Any territorial decision, he said, has to go to the Ukrainian people via “elections or referendum”—which, during wartime with millions displaced and no external guarantees, would be virtually impossible.

This could be preparation—laying groundwork for a concession he can’t authorize alone—or deflection, revealing the pressure without endorsing the outcome. The “zone” itself remains purely notional: Washington has a phrase, Moscow has a different phrase, neither has proposed who runs what. Trump’s team wants Ukrainian troops out first. Russia insists on keeping its forces in place. And Zelenskyy says only a referendum can decide what happens, and that vote couldn’t really happen. What there seems to be, so far: pressure and distancing around a notional zone defined by competing terminology.

Meanwhile

• Mrauk-U, 9:13 p.m. Burma’s military struck the general hospital in Mrauk-U on Wednesday night, killing 34 and injuring 80. A jet dropped two bombs on the 300-bed facility—overflowing with patients because most healthcare across Rakhine state has been suspended. The Arakan Army, which controls the township, says there’s been no recent fighting in the area. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, condemned the strike as a possible war crime. The Burmese junta has conducted 2,165 airstrikes this year through late November, compared with 1,716 in all of 2024.
• From spymaster to convict. A Pakistani military court sentenced former Inter-Services Intelligence director Lieutenant General Faiz Hameed to 14 years on Thursday—the first time a chief of the powerful spy agency has been court-martialed. The 15-month trial found him guilty of political interference, Official Secrets Act violations, and misuse of authority. Hameed, once considered among Pakistan’s most powerful figures, was close to former Prime Minister Imran Khan, jailed since 2023 after the military turned against him. Hameed’s prosecution consolidates power under current army chief General Asim Munir—whom Hameed replaced as ISI director in 2019.
• After class. Bolivian police arrested former President Luis Arce on Wednesday as he walked through an upscale La Paz neighborhood after teaching an economics class. The charges: embezzling roughly US$700 million from an Indigenous-development fund during his tenure as economy minister under former President Evo Morales. It’s been one month since conservative Rodrigo Paz ended 20 years of socialist rule in Bolivia; his government calls the arrest proof of its anti-corruption commitment. Arce’s allies call it political persecution. He faces a maximum of six years.
• Five provinces, no call. Thailand-Cambodia fighting stretched into day five on Thursday with both countries still waiting for a phone call from U.S. President Donald Trump—who’d said on Wednesday he expected to speak with both leaders on Thursday; Thai Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul says there’s been “no coordination” with him. The death toll so far: 11 Cambodian civilians, including an infant, and nine Thai soldiers. Across both countries, more than 500,000 have fled their homes. Trump brokered a ceasefire in July that he counted among “eight wars in eight months” he’d ended—but Thailand suspended the follow-on agreement in November.
• ‘Mobility with dignity.’ Climate migrants from Tuvalu began arriving in Australia this week under the world’s first formal bilateral climate-migration program. More than a third of Tuvalu’s 11,000 residents applied for the visa lottery; 280 can relocate annually. Among the initial intake: the country’s first woman forklift driver, a dentist, and a pastor. NASA projects that by 2050, daily tides will submerge half of Funafuti atoll, where 60 percent of Tuvaluans live on a strip of land as narrow as 20 meters.

From the latest member’s despatch

Creative destructions 

Why is European innovation-led growth so low? Andrea Lorenzo Capussela, The Republic of Innovation: A New Political Economy of Freedom.

Since 1995, the euro area’s GDP per capita has fallen behind America’s. After rapidly catching up with the United States following the Second World War, Europe has struggled to keep up. Today, the relative gap between the two is as big as it was in 1970. And as Asian economies have grown, they’ve marginalized Europe’s place in the global economy even more.

But the problem for Europe isn’t just that it’s lagging behind in sheer economic size; it’s that it’s lagging behind in high-tech innovation specifically. Europeans file roughly 20 percent of all patents under the Patent Cooperation Treaty, but only about 10 percent of high-tech patents. As France’s President Emmanuel Macron and other European politicians have lamented, the Continent’s sluggish growth is significantly the result of its inability to sustain intensive innovation.

Why is this?

New music

‘Tangled Woods’

One of the more surprising collaborations in the jazz world this year was the album King King, by the jazz drummer Joey Waronker. Sitting in: the guitarist Pete Min —not just on guitar, but on piano, synths, and drum machines too—and on this cut, the saxophonist Josh Johnson.