In the bustling central market of Tamale, in northern Ghana, an elderly woman named Fatima measures out grain with a battered tin cup. For nearly three years, her daily calculations have had very little to do with local rainfall and almost everything to do with artillery barrages thousands of miles away on the Black Sea steppe. When the price of imported wheat and ammonium nitrate spiked, Fatima did not receive an explanatory memorandum from Brussels or Washington; she simply watched the margins of her family's survival shrink until her grandchildren went to bed with thinner porridge. Her story is not unique. It has been lived out by millions of farmers, market women, and daily-wage laborers across Africa, South Asia, and Latin America who never cast a vote in Europe’s conflicts but nevertheless paid for them at the checkout counter.
Now, word arrives that the architects of the world's next chapter are meeting to settle accounts. Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, two men whose primary qualification in international statecraft is their familiarity with luxury commercial leases and distressed asset acquisitions, have touched down in Moscow. Fresh from closed-door gatherings in Abu Dhabi, they crossed the polished parquet of the Kremlin to sit opposite Vladimir Putin, with plans to fly onward to Ireland to present their findings to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
There is an almost grotesque poetry in sending men who built their fortunes on condominium towers and mezzanine debt to negotiate the fate of sovereign borders. To the real estate mind, territory is not a repository of memory, ancestry, or community; it is square footage waiting to be appraised, leveraged, and traded. One can almost see the spreadsheet being assembled across the Persian Gulf and Moscow: a port ceded here, a mineral basin leased there, security guarantees discounted like tenant improvement allowances. It is diplomacy reduced to a backroom foreclosure settlement, conducted entirely above the heads of those who live on the land, and entirely indifferent to the wider world that suffered its burning.
For the nations of the Global South, this spectacle is an old and bitter theater. When the tanks first rolled into Ukraine, Western capitals scolded the non-aligned world for failing to instantly sacrifice their own precarious economies on the altar of a rules-based international order. African and Latin American leaders were told that neutrality was cowardice, even as soaring fuel prices pushed their treasuries into default and forced them back into the predatory clutches of the International Monetary Fund. We were lectured that territorial integrity was sacred, an absolute principle upon which civilized commerce rested.
Yet the moment the northern empires grow weary of their standoff, the holy principles evaporate. In their place emerges the raw arithmetic of extraction and imperial sphere-building. The talks take place in the sparkling towers of the Emirates, where sanctioned Russian wealth has long mingled comfortably with Western hedge funds, brokered by dynastic emissaries who answer to no parliament, no electorate, and certainly no international law. It is a reminder that the so-called rules were only ever meant to govern the weak; the powerful simply hire private dealmakers to write an addendum to the lease.
Peace is desperately needed. No sensible person on this planet would wish for the slaughter in the trenches to grind on for another winter, consuming another generation of young Ukrainians and Russians and continuing to destabilize global harvest cycles. But there is a profound difference between a just and durable peace and an imperial carve-up engineered by property moguls. A genuine resolution would reckon with the wreckage left in the war's wake, including the debt traps sprung on developing nations and the weaponization of the world's food supply by warring superpowers.
That reckoning, of course, will not appear in whatever confidential memorandum emerges from these shuttles. When the final communique is drafted, it will be designed to satisfy the egos in Moscow, the financiers in the Gulf, and the political ambitions of an incoming administration in Washington. Outside the gilded doors, Fatima will still be measuring her grain by the tin cup, bearing the quiet, compounding interest of a war she had no part in making, negotiated by men who will never know her name.