Sportswashing: A masterstroke of foreign influence operations (Video) | Responsible Statecraft

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Analysis | Washington Politics

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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)

Analysis | Washington Politics

Trump Venezuela

Top image credit: President Donald Trump monitors U.S. military operations in Venezuela, from Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, on Saturday, January 3, 2026. (Official White House Photo by Molly Riley)

Geo-kleptocracy and the rise of 'global mafia politics'

“As everyone knows, the oil business in Venezuela has been a bust, a total bust, for a long period of time. … We're going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country,” said President Donald Trump the morning after U.S. forces invaded Caracas and carried off the indicted autocrat Nicolàs Maduro.

The invasion of Venezuela on Jan. 3 did not result in regime change but rather a deal coerced at the barrel of a gun. Maduro’s underlings may stay in power as long as they open the country’s moribund petroleum industry to American oil majors. Government repression still rules the day, simply without Maduro.

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Iran nuclear

Top image credit: An Iranian cleric and a young girl stand next to scale models of Iran-made ballistic missiles and centrifuges after participating in an anti-U.S. and anti-Israeli rally marking the anniversary of the U.S. embassy occupation in downtown Tehran, Iran, on November 4, 2025.(Photo by Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via REUTERS CONNECT)

Want Iran to get the bomb? Try regime change

Washington is once again flirting with a familiar temptation: the belief that enough pressure, and if necessary, military force, can bend Iran to its will. The Trump administration appears ready to move beyond containment toward forcing collapse. Before treating Iran as the next candidate for forced transformation, policymakers should ask a question they have consistently failed to answer in the Middle East: “what follows regime change?”

The record is sobering. In the past two decades, regime change in the region has yielded state fragmentation, authoritarian restoration, or prolonged conflict. Iraq remains fractured despite two decades of U.S. investment. Egypt’s democratic opening collapsed within a year. Libya, Syria, and Yemen spiraled into civil wars whose spillover persists. In each case, removing a regime proved far easier than constructing a viable successor. Iran would not be the exception. It would be the rule — at a scale that dwarfs anything the region has experienced.

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