Paul Arenberg

🇺🇦 Zelensky says US negotiators asked for the first time at the Abu Dhabi talks whether Ukraine would leave Donbas in exchange for joining NATO, and he now claims NATO is back on the agenda, though no concrete offer exists. He still refuses to withdraw, but says he would put the question to a referendum only if Ukraine first gets security guarantees, a strong and well funded army and money to rebuild, all confirmed by Washington and NATO allies. That means Kyiv wants American and European taxpayers to pay, and possibly to fight.

🇹🇷🇶🇦 Turkey and Qatar signed a mutual defence pact in Istanbul on Friday, pledging a unified stance against any external armed attack on either country. Erdogan and Emir Tamim also agreed on joint exercises, defence industry cooperation and personnel training. It is Ankara’s second such pact in three months, after the August deal with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan under which an attack on one counts as an attack on all. Middle-East countries are building their own security network instead of relying only on Washington.

🇮🇹 Giorgia Meloni has hit back at Italy’s left over her tax cut, saying a young hospital doctor earning 55,000 euros a year is not “a rich person to be fleeced” but “the middle class to defend”. The opposition accuses Rome of cutting taxes for the rich by extending a lower income tax rate up to that level, while proposing a wealth tax. Meloni replied that this doctor studied over ten years, works nights and holidays and takes home about 3,000 euros a month. A nation that treats its doctors and skilled workers as targets for new taxes punishes the very people who keep it running. “We want to reward merit, work and sacrifices,” Meloni said.

🇺🇸🇨🇳🇷🇺 Trump, Xi and Putin will sit down together on Thursday in Shenzhen, the first ever meeting of the leaders of the world’s three biggest nuclear powers, and Trump wants nuclear arms cuts on the table. The White House confirmed the meeting on Friday. New START, the last US-Russia arms treaty, expired in February, and Trump refused to extend it without China, which now has more than 600 warheads according to the Pentagon. A US official admits no deal is expected, but he said it is time for China to come “to the adults’ table”.

🇪🇸 Santiago Abascal opened the Vox campaign in Madrid tonight by calling Spain’s November 29 election “existential” and telling supporters gathered at Plaza de Colón that “we are risking everything”. His programme rests on national priority, less regulation and an end to what he calls the “migratory invasion”, with the repatriation of illegal migrants and of legal ones who commit crimes or live on welfare. That is common sense, not extremism. Meloni, Le Pen, Orbán and Milei all backed him by video, and Meloni said she would “very much like to collaborate with you at another level”. With polls giving PP and Vox a clear majority, Spain may finally get a government that puts Spaniards first.

🇫🇷🇺🇦 Marine Le Pen says she is ready to meet Zelensky, but in Brussels rather than Kyiv, because “the topic of Ukraine financing is rattling Europe”. The favourite for 2027 plans to keep French aid for six months after taking office and then stop it. She also aimed at Berlin, saying “the German chancellor is starting to threaten people”, after Merz threatened to cut EU funds for countries that refuse to pay for Ukraine, while Kyiv already says the €90bn EU loan will not cover its needs. Le Pen is right to take this to Brussels, because that is where French taxpayers’ money keeps being committed to Kyiv. A future president should negotiate on France’s terms, and an open cheque for Ukraine is not one of them.

Why Russia is back among the top-tier powers? In the 1990s, after the USSR collapsed, a small group of oligarchs seized the country’s most valuable assets. Through rigged privatizations, loans-for-shares schemes and political connections, they took control of oil, gas, metals and banks that had been built by the Soviet state. Russia’s natural wealth was being carved up while the population got poorer. By the late 1990s the state was weak, the oligarchs were powerful, and several of them openly tried to dictate politics. The 1998 crash and the chaos that followed made the situation untenable. When Putin came to power in 2000, the choice was clear: either the oligarchs would keep the country, or the state would take it back. The deal was simple. Stay out of politics and you can keep your money. Challenge the state and you lose everything. Khodorkovsky tested the limit with Yukos and ended up in prison. Others sold their stakes or accepted state partners. Media empires that had been used as political weapons were brought under control. Within a few years the biggest resource companies were either state-owned or tightly aligned with the Kremlin. Energy, the core of Soviet industrial power, returned under state influence. Gazprom, Rosneft and the nuclear sector were no longer private fiefdoms. Tax collection improved, reserves were rebuilt, and the state regained the ability to set national priorities instead of negotiating with a handful of billionaires. The oligarchs who remained did so on the state’s terms. While this was happening, much of the West moved in the opposite direction. Large-scale immigration changed the demographic composition of major cities and countries faster than any previous period in modern European or American history. Parallel societies appeared, social trust declined in many areas, and the political class treated the changes as irreversible and non-negotiable. At the same time, institutions and culture were reshaped by what critics call wokism: identity politics, speech restrictions, and the elevation of group grievances over shared national norms. Universities, corporations, media and parts of the state adopted these frameworks. Dissent was increasingly framed as moral failure rather than legitimate disagreement. Social cohesion eroded while the official response was more regulation and more ideological enforcement. Taxation and regulation rose in parallel. High-income and middle-class earners in Western Europe and parts of the US faced heavy tax burdens, complex rules, and expanding welfare systems that struggled under demographic pressure. Capital and talent became more mobile. Meanwhile Russia kept a different mix: lower effective taxes on energy and strategic sectors under state control, stricter limits on migration, and an official rejection of the progressive cultural shifts dominating Western institutions. The contrast is not that Russia became a liberal paradise. It is that one side reasserted state control over the wealth and territory inherited from the Soviet period, limited external demographic change, and refused the cultural and tax trajectory of the post-1990s West. The other side largely accepted high immigration, ideological transformation of its institutions, and rising fiscal loads. The results in power, cohesion and strategic autonomy have diverged accordingly.

🇫🇷🇮🇱 Israel has banned Jean-Luc Mélenchon and LFI’s Mathilde Panot from entering the country, after Mélenchon promised that as president he would send French ships to escort the activist flotillas sailing to Gaza. Gideon Sa’ar’s ministry said Israel “will not allow individuals who act against Israel and incite against its citizens to enter the country.” Paris called the ban demagogic, yet France itself refused entry to the Israeli settler leader Yossi Dagan only last week. Every nation has the right to decide who crosses its border, and a candidate who promises to send French ships to defy Israel’s blockade should not be surprised. The real worry for France is that this man wants to be its president in 2027.

Why globalists are the ultimate threat to our freedom? A nation without borders is not a nation. And a people without a nation has neither protection nor freedom. This is not an accident. Globalists treat borders as the last obstacle to their project. Like the Bolsheviks before them, they want peoples dissolved so power can sit above them. A nation is a people with a territory, a history, a language, laws, and a shared fate. Borders are what make that territory real and that people sovereign. Remove the borders and you do not get “humanity.” You get a population that can no longer govern itself. Without borders there is no control of membership. No ability to preserve a demographic or cultural majority. No durable political community that can say “this is ours.” Once that is gone, the institutions built by and for that people no longer answer to them. Protection and liberty follow. Protection requires the power to exclude. Police, armies, and borders exist to keep threats outside and enforce order inside. When entry is uncontrolled, safety becomes impossible to guarantee. Parallel societies, imported crime, and external political pressure become permanent. That is the opposite of security. Freedom is not abstract. It is the product of a specific legal and cultural order that developed inside nations able to control who belonged. Import large numbers who do not share those norms and the order erodes. Liberal democracy, free speech, and equal law require a cohesive demos. Without it, you get fragmentation or new majorities imposing different rules. Public goods are finite and were built by a defined people. Open the borders and either the system collapses under the load or it is captured by those who did not create it. In both cases the original population loses the benefits and the control. That is not solidarity. It is dispossession. The people pushing hardest against borders are not the poor or the oppressed. They are globalists: international institutions, NGOs, corporations, and political elites who prefer rule over atomized individuals to self-governing nations. Their project is totalizing. National loyalty, cultural continuity, and popular sovereignty stand in the way. So they must be dismantled. This is why the comparison to the Bolsheviks is precise. The old Bolsheviks were internationalists who saw nations and borders as reactionary obstacles to their revolutionary order. They subordinated peoples to a transnational ideology and a centralized power. Today’s globalists do the same with open borders, supranational governance, and the language of “humanity.” The goal is identical: weaken the nation so nothing remains between the individual and the higher authority. “No borders” is not neutrality or compassion. It is a political choice to dissolve peoples in favor of a managed, borderless space. The people who already live there do not get a lasting vote once the process advances. That is the negation of self-government and the condition for less freedom, not more. You can have open borders or you can have a nation. You can have a nation or you can have durable protection and freedom for a specific people. Globalists choose the first because it serves their totalizing project. The rest of us still have the right to refuse it. Borders are not the problem. They are the last line that keeps a people free and protected.

🇺🇦🇷🇺🇫🇮 Ukraine says it struck the Russian missile corvette Naro-Fominsk in the Gulf of Finland on Wednesday, near the Russian island of Gogland, about 40 km from Finland, in a narrow waterway used by oil tankers and civilian ships. Finland confirmed it detected the strike, and Finnish defence officials are understood to have reminded Kyiv that this waterway also carries subsea data cables. It is thought to be the first Ukrainian drone attack on a Russian ship in Baltic waters open to civilian traffic. Kyiv is widening its war right on the doorstep of Finland and Estonia, just as Washington is pushing both sides toward a deal. Helsinki should put Finnish security first and tell Kyiv plainly that the Gulf of Finland must not become a new front.

🇺🇸🇨🇳 A Reuters review has found more than $3 billion in Chinese AI data centre projects built around Nvidia chips that Washington bans from China, even though Nvidia says export controls have shut it out of the Chinese market. The projects rely on restricted H100, H200 and H800 processors and reach far beyond big tech firms, into local government ventures, universities and regional computing centres, and some are already running the banned chips. How the hardware got there remains unclear. Export controls only matter if they are enforced. Washington should track who ultimately uses American computing power, not just who signs the purchase order, because every leaked chip strengthens a strategic rival.

🇺🇸 SpaceX and Tesla are moving toward a merger that could be announced as soon as December, Bloomberg reports, joining a rocket maker worth more than $1.9 trillion with a carmaker worth about $1.5 trillion in the largest deal Musk has ever done. The main obstacle is how to wall off Tesla’s big manufacturing business in China from SpaceX’s US government and defence contracts. Democrats, who now control Congress, have also promised to investigate Musk. An empire in space, cars and AI is good news for the US, but a company that launches military satellites cannot depend on factories in China. Washington should demand that wall and not let Democrats block the deal out of political revenge.

🇺🇸 Trump says the Republican Senate cost his party the midterms by refusing to pass the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship and voter ID. “The Republican Senate can no longer be the place ‘where things are sent to die,’” he wrote on Truth Social. Republicans held the White House, the House and 53 Senate seats, but the bill needed 60 votes and John Thune refused to scrap the filibuster. Trump calls that “one of the greatest mistakes in the Political History of America” and expects Democrats to end it themselves. Asking people to prove they are citizens before they choose the government of a nation is basic sovereignty, and a party that held every lever of power and still hid behind a procedure has only itself to blame.

🇪🇺🇷🇺🇺🇸🇺🇦 Europe will sit at the next round of Ukraine peace talks after Putin agreed on Thursday to let European representatives join, US envoy Steve Witkoff said after meeting him in the Kremlin with Jared Kushner. “The Europeans will join at the next meeting, which we consider to be a very important moment,” Witkoff told Russian state TV. Kushner told Putin that Washington had detected “a big change” on the European side. Although European taxpayers fund the main part of the Ukrainian war, European leaders have to beg to obtain a seat at the negotiation table. That proves how incompetent they are.

🇺🇦🇺🇸 Ukraine says SpaceX’s Starshield, the military version of Starlink, has again been capped at 161 km/h along the whole front line, and SpaceX answers “This is false. There has been no change.” Zelensky says the cap stops his interceptor drones from catching Russian jet-powered drones. The first cap in October came amid tensions with the Trump administration over Kyiv’s strikes on Russian refineries, and this one came a day after the Abu Dhabi peace talks. Whatever the truth turns out to be, an army that depends on a foreign company’s satellites does not fully control its own war. Every nation that takes its defence seriously needs its own sovereign means.

🇮🇹 Roberto Vannacci, the former Italian special forces general who leads the nationalist National Future party, has told Giorgia Meloni what it will cost her to keep his votes after next year’s election. He told POLITICO he wants no more support for Ukraine, an end to “our support for the EU’s green deal” and the return of migrants who have not assimilated, because “we need to send them back”. He says that means about 4% of Italy’s population. Vannacci says he wants no cabinet job, only to keep leading his party. He speaks for voters who feel Rome still puts Brussels and Kyiv before its own citizens, and Meloni would be wise to listen to them.

🇷🇺🇪🇺 Putin told Trump’s envoys Witkoff and Kushner in the Kremlin today that any foreign troops deployed in Ukraine would be a “legitimate target” for Russia, a direct answer to the European plan to station soldiers there after a peace deal. He also said he would like the Americans to work with Europe “so that they can decide what they want, peace or war”, while Kushner said Europe wants a role in the talks and the Kremlin noted that the EU has still not managed to choose a single negotiator. European soldiers in Ukraine would not secure peace, they would put European lives at risk and give Moscow a reason to keep fighting. If Europe’s governments want a role, they should drop the troop plan and back the American mediation.

🇬🇧🇪🇺 Britain’s economy grew 0.7% in the third quarter, its fastest pace in two and a half years and the second best in the G7, behind only the United States. Over the same months the euro zone managed 0.4%, while Germany barely grew, Italy stalled and France actually shrank. The ONS says much of the British gain came from industries linked to artificial intelligence, such as computer programming and computer manufacturing. For years we were told that leaving the EU would doom the British economy. A country that sets its own rules is now growing faster than the bloc it left, and that should embarrass Brussels far more than London.

🇺🇸🇲🇽 Donald Trump has threatened to immediately double tariffs on Mexico unless it stops a caravan of about 1,500 migrants walking north, writing that “they will not be accepted!” and “There will be no leniency!” The group, mostly from Central America, set off on Tuesday from Tapachula near the Guatemalan border, hoping that the Democrats’ win in last week’s midterms would reopen the way into the United States. Trump called it “the INVASION of our Country” taking place again. This is how a sovereign country defends its border, by making the transit country pay a real price for letting caravans through. Mexico has the means to stop them, and Washington is right to use trade as leverage rather than wait for them at the border.

🇬🇧 Nigel Farage is accusing British pollsters of burying Reform UK, saying after a speech last week that “the jiggery-pokery that is going on with polling is utterly astonishing” as several surveys now put his party level with or behind the Conservatives. Farage says the raw data shows Reform clearly ahead of the Tories and denounces a “desperate push from the establishment” to bring back two-party politics, while pollsters such as More in Common stand by their numbers. He recalls that a similar poll by Lord Ashcroft had Reform on 21 per cent in May, before the party won 28 per cent in that month’s local elections. The old two-party establishment wants voters to believe the revolt is over, but the ballot box will settle that.