Sportswashing is the next frontier of foreign influence in the United States. Authoritarian regimes are investing billions of dollars in the sports that Americans love — from the NBA to WWE, UFC, and, the PGA Tour.
In many cases these investments come with strings attached. Foreign powers aren’t just trying to make money, they’re hoping to launder their reputations and censor their would-be critics in the U.S. This can have potentially dire consequences for Washington foreign policy, given that many of these regimes seek to pull the agenda in a decidedly unrestrained direction via U.S. military entanglements.
(Video production by Khody Akhavi)
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Just saying the words, “Letters of Marque” is to conjure the myth and romance of the pirate: Namely, that species of corsair also known as Blackbeard or Long John Silver, stalking the fabled Spanish Main, memorialized in glorious Technicolor by Robert Newton, hallooing the unwary with “Aye, me hearties!”
Perhaps it is no surprise that the legendary patois has been resurrected today in Congress. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) has introduced the Cartel Marque and Reprisal Reauthorization Act on the Senate floor, thundering that it “will revive this historic practice to defend our shores and seize cartel assets.” If enacted into law, Congress, in accordance with Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, would license private American citizens “to employ all reasonably necessary means to seize outside the geographic boundaries of the United States and its territories the person and property of any cartel or conspirator of a cartel or cartel-linked organization."
Although still enshrined in Constitutional canon, the fact that American citizens can be empowered to make war in a wholly private capacity skirts centuries-long understanding over “the laws of war.” At best, a letter of marque is to be issued only in the circumstance of a legally issued state declaration of war. Hence, a licensed corsair or privateer is akin to a sheriff’s deputy, who even as a private armed person is sworn to abide by the order and laws of the state.
History, however, does not support this best case. The plain truth — again, over centuries — tells the story of private naval enterprise practically unfettered. These are no Old West deputies under direct command of a U.S. Marshal. These are licensed raiders, serving autonomously, as flag-waving freebooters.
A letter of marque, the King’s signature notwithstanding, is simply licensed predation at sea — and this is under the most favorable aegis, when said letter is actually granted to a private person when the nation is at war. Yet most often, for the last 700 years, a letter of marque is really no more or less legal piracy.
But why would states want to create such a legal justification for attacking rivals and competitors, pesky inconvenient minor states, or in this case, drug traffickers?
Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn), who introduced his own bill in February, proudly confesses to the Washington Post that letters of marque would give “the president some constitutional power to go after the Bad Guys and not wait on Congress to give their permission.”
Here we come to our world reality — the exact same reality that has held for seven centuries — and that is this: States want to degrade their rivals, competitors, and their pesky minors without having to go to actual war. This is an ironclad rule of “international relations” that is also (forever cynically) unspoken. War continues as it has always, outside of any laws.
“Private” legions have often made private war, often at the behest of state authority, down the centuries. Think: William Walker’s Nicaraguan filibuster, the Jameson Raid on the Transvaal, the Freikorps rampaging in the Baltics, the Czech Legion’s battle across Siberia, Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers, Mike Hoare’s Congo Commandos. When they do state bidding, we call such fighting bands “proxies” — whether or not they operate with an official letter. The United States has been an eager — if not a standout — puppetmaster of privateers.
Like all privateers, however, the very autonomy of these armed groups leads them into gray areas outside of state sanction, into freebooting piracy. When they leave, or are let go by their state employers, they can easily go over to the dark side. Such was the fate of many most fabled pirate captains.
Two takeaways for today: First, the so-called laws of war are infinitely fungible, according to the desires of the state. Second, privateers — and pirates — are only meeting the compulsive need of legal authority to find someone who will go over to the dark side of the law for its own purposes.
After the grueling Napoleonic Wars, European powers tried to more decorously regulate the laws of war. In 1856, the Declaration of Paris, in the aftermath of the Crimean War, outlawed privateering altogether. The U.S., however, refused to sign. The U.S. Navy did, however, abolish prize money for naval crews in 1899, ostensibly to discourage piratical excesses at sea.
Yet, when there are dirty jobs that need doing, and the state seeks to avoid embarrassment through plausible deniability, it will always, unfailingly, turn to a willing proxy. Although the letter of marque, resurrected, lies at present merely in the realm of “sometimes a great notion,” the assets of both Washington Imperial and Crown covert agencies are even now attacking international shipping in the Black Sea, working from the media cover that these are Ukrainian strikes.
So why go to the trouble of reviving a troublesome and long-buried marque of state piracy from bygone days? Perhaps administration boosters want to widen the scope and means of U.S. seapower in decline. Perhaps they want to “spread the wealth” when it comes to making war, so that it is not so pointedly a government-only enterprise. Maybe some believe they can clothe a dirty war in flamboyant raiment, by invoking the romance of another age.
Judging from social and old-style media alike, there are legions of vocal patriots champing and clamoring to prime the frizzen and grab a cutlass. “Unleash the Privateers!” cries one highly respected military analyst. Robert Newton fans are almost ecstatically onboard.
Perhaps this rogue gang in Congress is truly channeling the Trumpian battlecry: Make War Aargh! Again
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Top photo credit: Palestinian Mohammed Abu Halima, 43, sits in front of his tent with his children in a camp for displaced Palestinians in Gaza City, Gaza, on December 11, 2025. Matrix Images / Mohammed Qita
Just ahead of the New Year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to visit President Donald Trump in Florida today, no doubt with a wish list for 2026. Already there have been reports that he will ask Trump to help attack Iran’s nuclear program, again.
Meanwhile, despite the media narrative, the war in Gaza is not over, and more specifically, it has not ended in a clear victory for Netanyahu’s IDF forces. Nor has the New Year brought solace to the Palestinians — at least 71,000 have been killed since October 2023. But there have been a number of important dynamics and developments in 2025 that will affect not only Netanyahu’s “asks” but the future of security in Israel and the region.
Here are four major takeaways from 2025 which will no doubt impact all sides of the conflict, including the U.S., in 2026.
Israel’s war on Gaza is continuing in all but name
Following the announcement of Trump’s 20-point plan for Gaza in October, which included a ceasefire and hostage/prisoner release, the world breathed a collective sigh of relief. Israel’s apocalyptic assault on Gaza has killed at least 71,000 Palestinians, including some 20,000 children, displaced nearly all of Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants, and wiped out most of its infrastructure, including more than 90 percent of its housing stock—a war that a UN Commission of Inquiry, along with a growing chorus of human rights groups and scholars, describe as a genocide.
Since the ceasefire officially went into effect on October 10, however, Israel has continued to carry out deadly airstrikes and other military operations killing more than 400 Palestinians in that time. Despite the ceasefire agreement, Israel continues to restrict humanitarian aid, including shelter materials and other essential items, so children are freezing to death. Meanwhile, the Gaza Strip has been effectively partitioned between an Israeli-controlled eastern zone and a narrow — and ever-shrinking — coastal strip where Hamas still operates and where the vast majority of Gaza’s 2 million residents are concentrated in what is now less than 40% of its territory.
Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure has also continued, including the demolition of 1,500 buildings since the start of the ceasefire. In addition to prolonging the suffering of people in Gaza, Israel’s continued attacks and ceasefire violations in Gaza threaten a wider explosion and the eventual collapse of the ceasefire itself. Netanyahu, who only reluctantly signed onto the ceasefire deal, may be trying to bait Hamas into a military response as a pretext for relaunching full-scale war on Gaza. Israel’s assassination of senior Hamas commander Raad Saad on December 13 has further shaken the already precarious truce and raised alarm bells within the administration, with Trump privately worrying that Netanyahu was derailing his peace plan.
The Trump plan risks turning the U.S. into a co-occupier of Gaza
The plan calls for the creation of an international Board of Peace (BoP) to run Gaza’s internal affairs, including future governance and reconstruction, and to be chaired by President Trump, as well as an International Stabilization Force (ISF) to oversee security in the Gaza Strip.
Palestinians, who were not consulted in the plan’s development, are afforded a more limited role in governing Gaza via a technocratic committee that reports directly to the BoP. Meanwhile, the United States and Israel have established a joint civil military coordination center (CMCC), located in southern Israel near the Gaza border, to oversee aid distribution and implementation of the ceasefire in the interim.
In addition, Trump has announced plans to appoint a two-star general to lead the ISF in Gaza. Despite Trump’s pledge not to put boots on the ground, with Americans in control of both the administrative and security arrangements in Gaza, there is a real risk of the U.S. becoming a co-occupier of Gaza alongside Israel. Such a scenario would further erode America’s international standing and could potentially subject U.S. personnel and assets to direct attacks in the region and beyond.
The price for supporting Palestine went up in 2025
To be clear, Americans that publicly expressed support for Palestinians’ human rights often paid a price under Biden, from losing jobs to facing physical violence. Yet under Trump, that price rose significantly.
Mahmoud Khalil was one of several activists targeted for deportation solely due to their advocacy for Palestine. Although some have been released, Leqaa Kordia, Ya’akub Vijandre, and others remain in detention. Similar to Biden, the Trump administration has sought to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism, but has intensified the resulting legal repercussions: the administration launched an Antisemitism Task Force, froze funding to universities, and carried out politically motivated “civil rights” investigations based on flimsy evidence.
A report produced by the American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association on the weaponization of civil rights law to repress campus speech stated that “Palestine is less an exception to academic freedom than it is a pretext for erasing the norm altogether.” Yet free speech is more than a norm, it is a Constitutional right enshrined in the First Amendment.
Unfortunately, the administration may soon undermine other fundamental freedoms: following the decisions by Texas and Florida governors to designate the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) a terrorist group — it is a domestic U.S. Muslim civil rights organization — many fear the administration may follow suit, fundamentally attacking the freedom of association. While such efforts have begun by targeting advocates for the rights of Palestinians and Muslims, they are unlikely to end there, with implications for Americans’ most basic liberties.
And yet support for Israel continues to fall
Despite the intensified repression of pro-Palestine speech, combined with concerted efforts by Israel’s supporters to suppress information about the daily horrors inflicted on Gaza, Israel continued to hemorrhage popular support in the U.S. A majority of Americans (53%) held a negative view of Israel as of April.
A poll in August found that 60% of voters disapproved of sending additional military aid to Israel. This shift is especially dramatic on the left, where 7 in 10 Democrats said that Israel has “gone too far” in its military operations in Gaza, yet even a majority of Republicans under age 45 say they would prefer a 2028 presidential candidate who would reduce U.S. security assistance to Israel.
Notably, 39% of American Jews describe Israel’s actions as “genocide.”
Meanwhile, candidates for the 2026 midterms running for both parties have refused to take money from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). This reflects a split in Trump’s coalition, where many are increasingly questioning how his administration can claim the mantle of “America First” when Israel’s preferences clearly dictate U.S. foreign policy towards the Middle East.
Despite their best efforts, Israel and its supporters have lost control of the narrative: soon after October 7, American billionaires coordinated with the Netanyahu government to spread pro-Israel messaging. As the carnage in Gaza continued unabated, Israel targeted journalists in an effort to staunch the flow of information. Yet even liberal darlings like Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz acknowledged that when she tries to advocate on behalf of Israel, she is “talking through a wall of dead babies.”
Efforts by billionaires like Larry Ellison to purchase TikTok and by Meta to censor information about Palestine have been unsuccessful, so far, in turning the tide of public opinion.
It seems unlikely that the shattered myth of American and Israeli interests as indistinguishable will re-emerge, at least in full, in 2026.
For the first time since President Trump publicly excoriated Nigeria’s government for allegedly condoning a Christian genocide, Washington made good on its threat of military action on Christmas Day when U.S. forces conducted airstrikes against two alleged major positions of the Islamic State (IS-Sahel) in northwestern Sokoto state.
According to several sources familiar with the operation, the airstrike involved at least 16 GPS-guided munitions launched from the Navy destroyer, USS Paul Ignatius, stationed in the Gulf of Guinea. Debris from unexpended munition consistent with Tomahawk cruise missile components have been recovered in the village of Jabo, Sokoto state, as well nearly 600 miles away in Offa in Kwara state.
No civilian casualties were reported in both areas, although there were damages to buildings in Offa.
It is the first direct U.S. airstrike on Nigeria’s soil — a West African oil-producing giant that Washington has often considered a crucial ally in the turbulent Sahel region. It is also the sixth country, following closely behind Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Syria and Yemen, where Trump has authorized airstrikes this year alone.
The U.S airstrike came a day after a bomb ripped through a mosque in Maiduguri in northeastern Nigeria, leaving at least five people dead and dozens injured. In a post on social media shortly after the airstrike, Trump identified the target as “ISIS Terrorist scum, who have been targeting and viciously killing, primarily, innocent Christians, at levels not seen for many years, and even Centuries!” He concluded by wishing everyone Merry Christmas “including the dead Terrorists.” The U.S. Africa Command (Africom) also said that “multiple Isis terrorists were killed” in strikes on camps in Sokoto.
But days after, there is still no official confirmation by the Nigerian government that any terrorists were killed. Many Nigerians are also asking: Why Sokoto? “The airstrike raises more questions than it resolves”, says Stephen Adewale, a Professor of History at the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU) in Nigeria.
A predominantly Muslim state, Sokoto is far removed from the Middle Belt where Christian communities have suffered the most sustained and large-scale violence in recent years in complex conflicts involving armed groups, criminal gangs, and communal tensions. The state is also far removed from the epicenter of the jihadist insurgency in Borno State in the northeast and the Lake Chad Basin area where the more prominent terrorist groups, Boko Haram (JAS) and Islamic State of West Africa Province (ISWAP) have built a base. Except for a network of notorious bandit groups that abduct civilians for ransom, Sokoto, whose population in any case is overwhelmingly Muslim, has not experienced the same scale of jihadist violence as other states in the region.
According to Nigeria’s government, foreign ISIS elements have been infiltrating Sokoto State from the Sahel region and, in collaboration with local affiliates, are using locations in the state as assembly and staging grounds to plan and execute large-scale terrorist attacks within Nigerian territory. But the only jihadist group in the state is the little-known Lakurawa, a shadowy Sunni group that came to prominence early this year when Nigeria government designated it a terrorist organization. The group started as a vigilante outfit invited from neighboring Sahel countries by local communities in northwestern Nigeria to protect them from bandits before evolving into a jihadist movement preaching and enforcing strict Islamist rules across villages along the borders of Sokoto and Kebbi States.
Despite U.S and Nigeria’s official statement saying the airstrikes targeted “Islamic state enclaves” in Sokoto State, Lakuruwa’s international affiliation is still an unresolved controversy with some jihadist experts claiming they are Al-Qaeda affiliates and others linking them with IS.
According to a new study by two researchers, James Barnett and Umar Musa, given the fluidity and fractious nature of jihadi alliances in the Sahel, some of the original members of the group may have been affiliated with JNIM in 2017-2018, but “present evidence points to the majority of so-called Lakurawa activity, particularly in Sokoto and northern Kebbi states, as being the work of ISSP militants.”
This has added a fresh layer to the controversy that has dogged U.S. policy in Nigeria since Trump declared last month Nigeria a “Country of Particular Concern” for failing to protect Christians,” and threatened to order U.S. troops into the country “guns-a-blazing.” Trump’s outburst caused a diplomatic row with Nigeria’s government and increased tensions within the country’s 230 million population. Since then, Abuja and Washington had been engaged in frenetic diplomatic talks which has seen delegations from both countries exchange visits and at least two congressional hearings in Washington.
The Christmas day bombing is the first public confirmation that both countries are now working together. According to a statement by Nigeria’s Minister of Information on Friday, December 26, the airstrike was conducted following “explicit approval by the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.” The statement added that the operation was carried out “with the full involvement of the Armed Forces of Nigeria and under the supervision of the Honorable Ministers of defense, as well as the Chief of defense Staff.”
The operation was also its first test of what is at the moment still a patchy relationship. The key issues of disagreement remain what they have been all along: the religious framing of the country’s conflict and Nigeria’s sensitivity towards its sovereignty even as it welcomes foreign military assistance. Several established groups that monitor the violence argue that Nigeria’s conflict is complex and that they have seen no evidence that Christians are being killed at a greater rate than Muslims.
Yet, the Trump administration’s characterization of the conflict has not changed. This remains a sore point for President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who came to power two years ago on a Muslim-Muslim ticket and is struggling to administer a country whose vast population is roughly evenly divided between adherent of both religions.
The simmering dissension has surfaced quickly in the immediate aftermath of the airstrikes. While Trump continued to frame them as part of his mission to protect Nigerian Christians from radical Islamists while promising more, Nigeria has struck a more even tone, insisting that the action is targeted at “terrorist violence in any form whether directed at Christians, Muslims or other communities.”
The day after the airstrike, Nigeria’s foreign minister, Yusuff Tuggar, was asked during an interview what he thought about Trump’s social media post framing the military strike as a defense of Christians, he replied “We’re focusing more on what has been done.” He added that Nigeria’s government is not going to “pore over the forensic details of what was said.”
Notwithstanding the gray areas, the emerging security cooperation between Trump and Tinubu testifies to both countries’ desire to work together to end a security crisis that has implications for the entire region. But what the last 48 hours has demonstrated is that there are underlying challenges that both countries need to work on for cooperation to prosper.
This is more the case now as there are indications that more strikes are likely in the coming days or weeks. Brant Phillip, a security analyst who has been tracking flight patterns of U.S airplanes and UAVs over Nigeria’s sky in the past weeks, reported on X that following a one-day pause, the U.S has resumed Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) flight missions, this time on ISWAP enclaves in the Sambisa forest of Borno state in the northeast of Nigeria.
“Even when undertaken with consent or cooperation, foreign military action that appears misaligned with local realities risks strategic blowback,” Professor Adewale said. “It can undermine state sovereignty, fuel suspicion among local populations, and reinforce perceptions that external actors do not fully understand the societies they intervene in.”
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