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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Ben Freeman is Director of the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute. He investigates money in politics, defense spending, and foreign influence in America. He is the author of The Foreign Policy Auction, which was the first book to systematically analyze the foreign influence industry in the United States.
Top photo credit: US President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting ahead of peace signing ceremony with Democratic Republic of the Congo Foreign Minister Therese Kayikwamba Wagner (R) and Rwandan Foreign Minister Olivier Nduhungirehe (2nd-L) in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, USA on June 27, 2025. (Reuters)
On a roll: Trump to host 5 African leaders this week
President Trump’s policy towards the African continent in 2025 was loaded with personal disagreements, peace negotiations, and efforts to improve economic exchange.
Through the ups and downs of Trump’s Africa policy, it became increasingly clear as the year wore on that contrary to observers’ early expectations, Trump’s team is indeed prioritizing Africa.
Here’s a review of the top five stories that defined Trump’s policy towards Africa in 2025.
Diplomatic Scuffle with South Africa
The president’s term began with a proverbial shot across the bow. Just days into his administration, the president accused the South African government of failing to halt a genocide he claimed was being perpetrated by the country’s native black population against white farmers part of the Afrikaner ethnic group.
He then signed an executive order on February 7, accusing Pretoria of expropriating the land of white South Africans without fair compensation, and giving that land to the country’s black population. Trump ordered the U.S. to “not provide any aid or assistance to South Africa,” and also to “promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation.”
The rift culminated in an extraordinary argument in the Oval Office on May 21 between South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and Trump. During the encounter, Trump continued his attacks on the South African government with his counterpart sitting beside him.
At one point, Trump ordered the lights to be dimmed and drew attention to a television screen, which played clips of leaders from a South African minority political party calling for attacks against the country’s white population. Trump then held up printed copies of news articles he claimed discussed the death of white South Africans.
The relationship never mended. Under Trump’s demand, the United States government boycotted the Group of 20 (G20) summit in late November hosted by South Africa in Johannesburg, and disinvited South Africa from next year’s G20 summit, which is to be hosted by the United States in south Florida.
Massad Boulos' role as Senior Africa Advisor
Among the early signs that Trump would prioritize Africa as part of his administration’s broader foreign policy came on April 1, when Massad Boulos was announced as Trump’s Senior Advisor for Africa.
Although Boulos, the father-in-law to Trump’s daughter Tiffany, had no previous experience in diplomatic affairs on the continent, he has a close relationship with the Trump family, and has proven himself to be the president’s right-hand man on Africa policy.
Without Boulos, Trump’s policy towards the continent would have likely been muddled in layers of State Department bureaucracy.
Peace agreement between the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Rwanda
President Trump has spoken extensively over the course of his second term of his desire to be seen as a peacemaker who ends lengthy international conflicts. In Africa, this desire has manifested itself most fully in the administration’s effort to end the decades-long war between the DRC and Rwanda. Boulos’ first task as senior advisor was to work with the Qataris to mediate a permanent ceasefire in the war between the DRC and Rwanda.
Among the major reasons the Trump administration spotlighted this conflict as its first peace initiative on the continent was a desire to tap into the region’s vast mineral wealth. The DRC and surrounding countries are home to some of the world’s largest reserves of critical minerals, important for a vast number of technologies used in products such as electric vehicles, smartphones, and batteries.
The conflict between the DRC and Rwanda is complicated by the mix of rebel groups involved. M23 is the primary Rwanda-supported rebel force opposing the DRC and its many militias, known collectively as the Wazalendo. The governments of the DRC and Rwanda have themselves been fiercely antagonistic to one another, making a lasting peace deal all the less likely to take root.
Yet, to the administration’s credit, it achieved a preliminary peace agreement that was signed by the foreign ministers of both countries in a ceremony overseen by President Trump in the Oval Office on June 27. Then, on December 4, the presidents of both countries met in Washington in a very rare face-to-face encounter to sign the second phase of the agreement, which included American access to mineral wealth.
Although fighting has continued sporadically since June’s peace agreement, Trump’s emphasis on ending the conflict has at the very least created a framework for what a lasting peace could look like.
Effort to end the war in Sudan
Boulos has also been leading the president’s effort to secure peace in the intractable civil war in Sudan between the country’s Sudanese Armed Force (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
Boulos, who said Sudan would become his top priority after the DRC-Rwanda deal was signed in June, has joined forces with counterparts in the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia — known collectively as the Quad — to try to negotiate an end to the war.
But the Quad has failed to substantially move the peace process forward. Just one day after the group met for negotiations in Washington in late October, the RSF succeeded in their 18-month siege of El-Fasher, overrunningSAF forces to take over the capital of North Darfur province. El-Fasher’s fall has solidified the geographic splitting of the country, with the RSF controlling the southwest and the SAF ruling much of the rest of Sudan.
And yet, Trump’s team continues its effort to resolve the conflict. In mid-December, Boulos met with SAF leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan in Riyadh as part of mediation discussions. The effort to end this war will likely be among the administration’s top priorities for Africa in 2026.
Economic engagement with Africa
Beyond the efforts to end wars on the continent, Trump has also set his sights on advancing American economic engagement with Africa. As part of this, the U.S. government promoted the U.S.-Africa Business Summit in late June in Luanda, Angola. The event secured a record $2.5 billion in business deals between American and African partners in a range of industries, including digital infrastructure, cybersecurity, energy, and hospitality.
This event followed through on the State Department’s launch of a commercial diplomacy strategy for the continent in May. In a speech launching the strategy, Senior Africa Bureau Official Troy Fitrell said that Africa “is the world’s largest untapped market,” and that officials in this administration “no longer see Africa as a continent in need of handouts, but as a capable commercial partner.”
In line with the desire to increase America’s economic connectivity to the continent, the administration has continued investing in the construction of the Lobito Corridor, a collection of rail and feeder roads connecting inland mining sites and cities to the Lobito Port on Angola’s Atlantic coast, from where finished and unfinished goods can access the world. On December 17, the administration announced a $553 million loan through the Development Finance Corporation to support the corridor’s construction.
Trump has also signaled support for the extension of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), a preferential trade deal that lapsed this past September. The agreement provides duty-free access to over 1,800 goods from Africa to the United States, increasing the accessibility of the American market to African sellers who would otherwise struggle to compete with the low price of goods coming from other regions.
But, in typical Trump fashion, his AGOA support suffers from a contradiction. The sweeping global tariffs that he implemented in an effort to force what he considers to be improved trade relations with the United States included a 15% tariff rate on 13 AGOA-eligible countries, as well as a 30% tariff for AGOA-eligible South Africa, effectively eliminating AGOA benefits for these countries.
The U.S. bombs Nigeria
On Christmas, the United States launched an airstrike that killed members of the Islamic State in northwest Nigeria. In a post on his Truth Social account, the president said these terrorists "have been targeting and viciously killing, primarily, innocent Christians." In an interview on local television after the attack, Nigeria's Foreign Minister Yussuf Tuggar said that his country's government had coordinated with the United States on the attacks, which had been planned for weeks.
This strike comes after the American president had ordered Nigeria to be placed on a "watch list" in late October for violence the president claims has been committed by non-Christian armed groups against the country's Christian population. In an October 31 post on Truth Social, Trump said, "Christianity is facing an existential threat in Nigeria. Thousands of Christians are being killed. Radical Islamists are responsible for this mass slaughter. I am hereby making Nigeria a ‘COUNTRY OF PARTICULAR CONCERN’.” Days after the post, Nigerian government leaders denied Trump's claim that armed groups in the country target people because of their religious affiliation.
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Top image credit: ChameleonsEye, noamgalai, AI Teich via shutterstock.com
Earlier this month, Republican Congressman Thomas Massie mocked the idea of a potential U.S. regime change war with Venezuela, ostensibly over drug trafficking.
"Do we truly believe that Nicholas Maduro will be replaced by a modern-day George Washington? How did that work out? In Cuba, Libya, Iraq, or Syria?"
"Previous presidents told us to go to war over WMDs, weapons of mass destruction, that did not exist,” he added, taking a direct dig at President George W. Bush. Now it's the same playbook, except we're told that drugs are the WMDs."
In 2016 Trump ran for president as the anti-Bush, slamming the Iraq War justifications on the Republican primary debate stage. “Obviously, the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake, all right? They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none, and they knew there were none,” Trump said then.
Now Team Trump talks about fentanyl being a WMD and teases war. Massie had a point in comparing Trump to Bush and Dick Cheney in more ways than one.
Even though Trump once accused the second Bush administration of lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the president is now whipping out the same canard to justify U.S. military actions against Venezuela, which his administration has carried out to great controversy.
Signing an executive order in December that classifies fentanyl as a WMD, Trump said, “No bomb does what this is doing,” noting the significant number of overdose deaths caused by the synthetic opioid in the United States.”
“So we’re formally classifying fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction,” the president declared.
Never mind the fact that Venezuela is not the primary source of fentanyl. In fact, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has said “Mexico and China are the primary source countries for fentanyl and fentanyl-related substances trafficked directly into the United States,” while “India is emerging as a source for finished fentanyl powder and fentanyl precursor chemicals.”
“The simple fact is we are headed to a regime change efforts in Venezuela based entirely on a false pretense (flimsier than WMD),” wrote Breaking Points podcast host Saagar Enjeti, comparing the situation to the lead-up to the Iraq War..
“Speaking of wars being over, how about the folks in the admin doing a bad remake of Iraq? Cause that went so well,” Republican Senator Rand Paul shared on X, just before Christmas. adding, “They even brought out the greatest hits, like seizing oil and ‘weapons of mass destruction.’”
The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart — who spent much of his early career deriding Bush and Cheney and the war — was floored that Trump would deploy this line of reasoning, saying in a recent monologue, “You guys have the balls to tell us that the pretext for Iraq was bullshit, and that war was a mistake, and we’re not like that, and also Venezuela has weapons of mass destruction and we have to stop them?”
2. 'Narco-Terrorists’
During the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, many Republicans in the Bush-Cheney era insisted the U.S. was fighting not mere “terrorists” but “Islamofascists.” President Bush himself used the phrase “Islamic fascists.”
It was a label intended to make America’s enemies more evil and ubiquitous, numbering beyond even the al-Qaida terrorists who caused 9/11, which meant the war could be as far reaching as the Bush administration wanted.
Similarly, the Trump administration doesn’t just wage war on run-of-the-mill drug traffickers these days, it now targets “narco-terrorists” — raising the specter of 9/11 — and says the traffickers are selling drugs to wage war on the United States. Writer Martin DiCaro explained the greater significance of this after American forces reportedly killed two survivors of a U.S. boat strike:
“The term ‘narco-terrorist’ is meant to dehumanize and desensitize. Their conduct — murder, terrorism, and poisoning Americans’ bodies — morally disqualifies them and, therefore, justifies extraordinary punishment. The possibility that harmless fishermen are blown to pieces must not weaken our leaders’ resolve to defend the nation.”
Di Caro added, “The boat strikes may be illegal and appalling, but the Trump administration’s conduct follows a long historical pattern, where America’s enemies operate outside the acceptable boundaries of civilization, and Washington's heavy-handed response can be justified by notions of national security, economic interests, racial superiority, or basic human decency — or all four simultaneously.”
Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna pleaded with the defense secretary and vice president, both Iraq War veterans, in November. “(Pete Hegseth) and (JD Vance) you were sent to fight a war that was based on a lie.”
“Now you are asking Americans to trust intelligence for a war in Venezuela,” he added. “What happened to you?”
3. Using ‘war on terror’ standards
Much of how the Trump administration conducts itself is reminiscent of Bush-Cheney, the Patriot Act, and the national security state after 9/11.
As Elizabeth Beavers observed in Responsible Statecraft in November:
“The original decision to treat the 9/11 attacks not as crime but as warfare, and to launch a literal ‘war on terror’ in response, remains the primary post-9/11 legal innovation on which so many abuses are made possible. Under this global war paradigm, the Obama administration carried out ruthless drone killings, including one that targeted a U.S. citizen, and justified the strikes with a mish-mash of legal standards that applied rules of war outside of actual war zones, and expansively interpreted what constitutes an’“imminent threat’ and resulting ‘self-defense’ powers.
“Every post-9/11 president has claimed wide authority to use military force so long as it serves a vague ‘national interest,’” Beavers added. “We can see echoes of this in the Trump administration’s insistence that the small Venezuelan boat blown up by the U.S. military posed an ‘immediate threat to the United States,’ that the strike complied with the laws of war, and was ‘in defense of vital U.S. national interests.”
Sen. Rand Paul chided the administration in October, “When you kill someone, you should know, if you’re not at war, not in a declared war, you really need to know someone’s name at least,” Paul said. “You have to accuse them of something. You have to present evidence. So all of these people have been blown up without us knowing their name, without any evidence of a crime.”
4. Bombing Iran
One foreign policy action taken by the Trump administration in 2025 might have even out-Bushed, Bush: A military strike on Iran.
Former Trump adviser John Bolton as well as the many neoconservatives and their friends who once staffed the Bush administration have been aching for direct U.S. military action against Iran for a long time. The late John McCain even once famously made that wish into a song.
“I’ve never been, and don’t intend ever to be, a supporter of Donald Trump. But I wish the president and his administration well in this crisis,” wrote Never Trumper hothead and top Bush-era neocon Bill Kristol on June 13
What Trump didn’t do, thankfully, is pursue a regime change war in Iran which is what hawks have long desired most. As Congressman Khanna said in July, “The reality is, people want regime change in Iran, and they are egging this president on to bomb. I hope cooler heads will prevail.”
In May, President Trump had blasted “interventionalists” and “neocons” during a major speech in Saudi Arabia. But after the Iran strike, The New Statesmen’s Freddy Hayward asked if Trump was instead indeed “the last neoconservative.”
“Like Bush, Trump may become a president who was elected to fix America but ends up ordering troops to the Middle East,” he wrote. “This war has become a test of whether the neoconservative age is over.”
***
Some of Trump’s top staff postings played right into the hands of the old Cold War warrior and neoconservative guard, which had generally made up the Bush-Cheney national security establishment in the early 2000s. Some of the president’s more radical ideas, like rebuilding Gaza, uncannily hew to proposals that neoconservatives like Elliott Abrams had put forward for the post-war territory.
Unfortunately, these are not the only examples of this “America First” president sounding more like “Mission Accomplished” in 2025.
Top image credit: Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks with President Donald Trump during an event in the State Dining Room at the White House Oct. 8, 2025. Photo by Francis Chung/Pool/ABACAPRESS.COM VIA REUTERSCONNECT
The first year of a presidency promising an "America First" realism in foreign policy has delivered not a clean break, but a deeply contradictory picture. The resulting scorecard is therefore divided against itself.
On one side are qualified advances for responsible statecraft: a new National Security Strategy repudiating primacy, renewed dialogue with Russia, and some diplomatic breakthroughs forged through pragmatic deal-making.
On the other, particularly in Latin America, lies a stubborn residue of ill-conceived interventionism, and, like in the Middle East, strategic incoherence — legacies of the very foreign policy orthodoxy the Trump administration vowed to overturn.
This is the central tension of the moment: a government caught between some restraint tendencies and actions still firmly rooted in ruinous interventionism.
Five Foreign Policy Successes for Realism/Restraint in 2025
1. A New National Security Strategy: The new National Security Strategy (NSS) represents a significant, if incomplete, shift away from the pursuit of primacy. Its formal rejection of global dominance marks a necessary break from the post-Cold War consensus that led to endless war and strategic overextension.
Framing power, balancing, and prioritization as central pillars of statecraft — while explicitly stepping back from democracy-versus-autocracy ideology, a cornerstone of the Biden administration’s strategy — creates space for a more focused and sustainable foreign policy. This is clearest in the document's approach to Ukraine, where it acknowledges the imperative of managing escalation risks with a nuclear-armed Russia.
However, while the strategy pivots away from primacy, its transition to restraint at best incomplete. The focus on the Western Hemisphere, for example, is rational, but Washington's continued reliance on coercive tools in Latin America risks undermining regional partnerships and pushing nations closer to Beijing — already a top trading partner for many.
While the strategy correctly diagnoses the multifaceted European decline, its language on Europe’s “civilizational erasure” feels over-wrought, and its overt courting of nationalist parties in Europe may backfire in the same way the administration’s rhetoric on Canada hurt the chances of a pro-Trump candidate in that nation.
The true test will be whether this nascent framework translates into an actual policy of restraint. For now, the NSS stands as an acceptable, though hesitant, first step away from primacy and toward a more realistic grand strategy.
2. Re-engagement with Russia on Ukraine: The administration’s handling of the Ukraine war is perhaps its clearest — if most contentious — expression of nascent strategic restraint.
President Donald Trump’s core objective — to shut the war down — is a necessary break from the prior policy of indefinite proxy war and severed diplomatic contact with Moscow. He deserves credit for re-establishing direct U.S.-Russia dialogue, launching a peace initiative and resisting significant pressure, including from within his own party, to take escalatory steps like supplying Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine or imposing secondary sanctions on Russian oil.
However, this remains a highly qualified success. The initiative has been undermined by inconsistent presidential rhetoric and a flawed transactional approach. A truly successful strategy would require steadier execution and, critically, must avoid the trap of any NATO-like security guarantee to Ukraine.
For now, the shift from maximalist aims to active, if messy, diplomacy represents the best path toward ending the conflict and de-risking a direct NATO-Russia confrontation.
3. Breakthrough with Belarus: This achievement stems from a discreet, calibrated engagement with the Belarussian government, replacing the fruitless moralizing and maximalist rhetoric typified by the Biden administration and European officials. The current U.S. approach, spearheaded by Special Envoy John Coale (who deserves high praise for this achievement), directly secured the release of over 100 high-profile political prisoners in Belarus in exchange for sanctions relief on some Belarussian agricultural exports and a prospect of further normalization.
This process demonstrated to both Minsk and its close ally Moscow that Washington can be a pragmatic actor, that sanctions are not perpetual but can be lifted in exchange for concrete concessions, creating a powerful incentive for negotiation.
4. Restraint in Yemen: The 2025 U.S.-Houthi ceasefire stands as a clear example of America First restraint in action. By securing a halt to attacks on U.S. vessels in exchange for ending its own bombing campaign, the administration achieved a narrow, definable security interest through discrete diplomacy, facilitated by Oman.
Crucially, this success stemmed from refusing to link the deal to broader, unrealistic goals, such as demanding the Houthis cease their campaign against Israel absent a Gaza ceasefire. This disciplined focus on a direct, reciprocal arrangement avoided the trap of another endless war in the Middle East.
5. The domestic realignment: A cross-ideological movement for foreign policy restraint gained momentum in 2025. This movement found its most potent symbol in the strategic alliance between Republican Congressman Thomas Massie and Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna. Their partnership, focused on reasserting Congress’s constitutional authority over war, became a powerful vehicle for a growing left-right consensus against endless conflict.
Simultaneously, a significant ideological shift occurred on the right, particularly among younger Republicans, who are increasingly skeptical of unconditional support for Israel. Together, these developments fractured the longstanding bipartisan foreign policy orthodoxy, signaling a promising domestic realignment in favor of restraint.
5 Foreign Policy Failures for Realism/Restraint in 2025
1. The Iran strikes debacle: A catastrophic strategic blunder. After promising negotiations with Iran, the U.S. joined Israeli strikes on Iran, shattering diplomatic progress. The administration’s adoption of Israeli red lines (no uranium enrichment) rather than American ones (no weaponization) has led negotiations to a dead-end. With Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu back lobbying for another war with Iran, this time over the country’s ballistic missiles (with Trump claiming that the nuclear infrastructure was destroyed during the U.S. strikes), Trump’s ability to resist the pressure will define the commitment to restraint in the Middle East. The track record is not encouraging.
2. Reckless escalation with Venezuela: The lethal interdiction of vessels without clear proof of illicit activity constitutes an illegal act of war absent congressional mandate. The administration offers shifting rationales for its aggressive posture: first, it was about fighting drug trafficking, then it shifted to allegations of Venezuela “stealing American oil.” This creates an overall impression that Trump’s real goal is a regime change in Caracas.
Given the record, regime change in Venezuela is more likely to produce a Libya in the Western Hemisphere than a prosperous, stable, US.-friendly nation. Besides, the focus on regime change exposes glaring inconsistency: while accusing the Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro of drug trafficking, the U.S. pardons a convicted drug-trafficking ex-president of Honduras and actively meddles to support his political party in the elections in that nation.
3. The Syria quagmire endures: The deaths of U.S. personnel in Syria are a direct consequence of the failure to decisively end the military mission after the defeat of ISIS's territorial caliphate. American troops remain in Syria without a clear strategic objective, making them perpetual targets for ISIS and other hostile forces.
There is a general acknowledgment that the Middle East should no longer dominate U.S. foreign policy. Rather than securing American interests, the indefinite deployment in Syria drags the U.S. back into regional quagmires and guarantees future casualties. The only way to prevent further loss of life is to finally execute a complete withdrawal from Syria. The U.S. presence there has long outlived whatever rational purpose it ever had and become a lethal liability.
4. Failure to apply pressure on Israel: The Trump Administration's comprehensive failure to apply meaningful pressure on Israel in 2025 represents a dual collapse of foreign policy restraint, abandoning both diplomatic leverage and the principles of international law.
While providing unconditional support for Israeli actions, the administration removed any incentive for Israel to respect a Trump-mediated ceasefire in Gaza, let alone pursue a genuine political solution with the Palestinians.
This abdication was compounded by the administration's decision to sanction International Criminal Court judges investigating the conflict. Punishing jurists for following international law to shield an ally from accountability is the antithesis of restraint and of America First policy. It is a myopic and reckless strategy that entangles America as a co-sponsor of conflict and injustice.
5. Congressional dereliction of duty on War Powers. In December 2025, Congress failed in its most basic constitutional duty when the House of Representatives defeated, by a razor-thin 211-213 vote, a resolution to prohibit unauthorized military action against Venezuela. This was not a simple policy disagreement but a dereliction of the legislative branch’s power to declare war. The vote came as President Trump had already imposed a blockade on Venezuela — an act of war under international law — and amassed a formidable naval armada in the Caribbean, creating a clear path toward open conflict.
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