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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Top image credit: Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever holds a press conference after a summit of Heads of State and Government of the European Union (18-19 December), in Brussels, on Thursday 18 December 2025. BELGA PHOTO NICOLAS MAETERLINCK via REUTERS CONNECT
The European Union’s leaders began their crucial summit on Thursday aimed at converging around the Commission’s proposal to use Russian funds frozen in Europe to guarantee a “reparations loan” to Ukraine. In the early hours on Friday, they opted instead to extend a loan of €90 billion backed only by the EU’s own budget. The attempt to leverage the Russian assets opened a breach within the EU that could not be overcome. As the meeting opened, seven members — Belgium, Italy, Hungary, Slovakia, Czechia, Bulgaria and Malta — had opposed the proposal. Germany, Poland, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and the three Baltic countries were its main supporters.
Proponents of the reparations loan — above all Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz — argued that approval would make the EU indispensable to any diplomatic settlement of the war in Ukraine. The EU as a whole recognized that Ukraine’s war effort and governmental operations require substantial new financing no later than the first quarter of 2026.
Russian reserves held in EU banks amount to about €210 billion, of which €185 billion are heldby Brussels-based depository Euroclear. A loan to Ukraine guaranteed by all or some of the Russian assets held in the EU would, it was argued, be repaid by Russia in postwar reparations.
Belgium and Euroclear saw this scheme as exposing them to unacceptable risks, including litigation by Russia or confiscation of frozen assets of European companies in Russia. In the end, France joined Italy to lead opposition to the reparations loan scheme, and Belgium’s demands for legally binding guarantees could not be accommodated. Politico had even called Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever a Russian asset for standing firm against the frozen asset scheme.
Lines are drawn
Those opposed to using Russian financial assets in European banks have distinctive motivations. Belgium sees financial risks posed to Euroclear and to Belgium itself in the (not unlikely) event that Russia does not recognize any obligation to pay reparations when the war ends. Belgium has asked for and not received what it considers to be legally binding undertakings from the rest of the EU nations to guarantee to share in compensating Russia in the event of a successful legal challenge to Euroclear’s allowing the reparations loan to be backed by the Russian assets held there.
Next, the Trump administration reportedly urged EU members not to adopt the reparations loan scheme, because the U.S. may want Russia to authorize the use of some or all of its frozen assets in Europe to fund reconstruction in Ukraine as part of a peace settlement.
And several EU countries above all Hungary and Slovakia, but also Czechia and Italy, have a particularly close affinity with the U.S. administration and saw the EU Commission’s proposal as too risky.
Failure to win support
The IMF estimates that Ukraine will need around €140 billion to fill a financing gap in 2026 and 2027. The Commission sought to issue a loan backed by Russian reserves frozen in Euroclear to Ukraine of around €70 billion in early 2026 and 2027.
The obvious alternative, which the Commission had considered and discarded, was to for the EU to lend its own funds with repayment guaranteed by the EU budget. Under EU law, this kind of financing requires unanimous support from all members. Hungary pledged to veto this idea, leaving the reparations loan as the preferred alternative of Ukraine’s strongest supporters.
EU leaders considered this question under qualified majority rules. This could in principle have allowed the scheme to be adopted without the agreement of Belgium and the other opponents. As a practical matter, however, even the strongest supporters agreed that the proposal could not be adopted over Belgium’s objections. All parties represented in Belgium’s parliament backed the country’s determination to refuse the reparations loan unless the EU member states gave legally binding guarantees to share the legal liability with Belgium.
Because Euroclear underpins the position of the Euro as a reserve currency, any action that amounted to confiscation of euro-denominated assets could harm confidence in the currency and raise borrowing costs of EU governments.
The reparations loan would be paid back by Russian reparations, only if Russia could be compelled to pay. Since this was unlikely, the ultimate repayment obligation would ultimately fall on EU member countries. This would be made more explicit if the EU member states agreed to be legally bound to share liability with Belgium.
Giving war a chance?
Proponents of the failed reparations loan scheme hoped to ensure the EU is at the table in settlement of conflict. But this effort was evidently at cross purposes with U.S. mediation efforts and in fact seemed to set back any progress toward an early end to the war. In the end, opponents of any new funding for Ukraine — Hungary, Czechia and Slovakia — agreed not to obstruct an EU loan to Ukraine, demonstrating that this alternative was never out of reach.
The failure of the single-minded drive of the Commission, Germany and other major supporters of the reparations loan scheme to use the frozen Russian assets may well have damaged the EU’s ambitions to become a geopolitical actor on an equal footing with the United States, Russia, or China.
By leveraging the dual-use nature of many of their products, where defense technologies can be integrated into the commercial sector and vice versa, Pentagon contractors like Palantir, Skydio, and General Atomics have gained ground at home for surveillance technologies — especially drones — proliferating war-tested military tech within the domestic sphere.
The dual-use push
Notable examples of this dual-use push involve tech tested in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, as part of the U.S. war on terror. Released in 2008, controversial software company Palantir’s Gotham platform was initially promoted as intelligence software for defense and counter-terrorism purposes. Piloted to predict adversaries’ use of improvised explosives during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and later adopted by Israeli defense and intelligence agencies amid war on Gaza, Palantir has simultaneously marketed Gotham as a data-centric policing tool.
Now adopted among U.S. law enforcement, hundreds of police departments can use Gotham to analyze data on civilians’ whereabouts. Palantir has gone on to sell similar software to other government agencies, obtaining a $30 million ICE contract this spring to help the agency track undocumented immigrants.
L3Harris Stingrays, or cell site simulators, are sophisticated phone trackers originally designed for military use; they likewise were utilized during wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Police departments subsequently adopted these systems to track and collect information on crime suspects, though L3Harris is slowly phasing them out.
Defense contractors' domestic drone craze
Fast forward, defense contractors are similarly leveraging their battle-tested drones to capitalize on a booming domestic market.
Indeed, law enforcement interest in “drone as first responder” programs has exploded; the broader public safety drone market is expected to nearly triple within the next 10 years. Ongoing federal funding and legislative efforts also stand to buoy the sector: the Trump administration is putting $1.5 billion toward drone and counterdrone technologies, including $500 million toward state and local governments’ anti-drone security strategies ahead of the U.S. hosting the FIFA World Cup next year.
The DRONE Act, meanwhile, included in the FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act, would let police purchase and operate the systems with federal grants, thus flooding drone procurement processes with more federal funds if made law.
Universities like Yale, meanwhile, have used Skydio and other commercial drones, to surveil students at pro-Palestine campus protests, reflecting a larger push by higher education to incorporate drones into campus security.
Used for lethal strikes and reconnaissance in Afghanistan, Iraq, and in the Caribbean, the MQ-9 Reaper drone, also used to search for Israeli hostages in Gaza, was deployed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to to support federal law enforcement operations at the L.A. protests earlier this year. CBP gave General Atomics a contract worth up to $528 million for its Reaper drones in 2022.
Utah-based army contractor Teal Drones’ Golden Eagle UAVs and Teal 2 drones have been extensively deployed in Ukraine, where Teal 2 drones provide reconnaissance capacities to Ukrainian drone pilots fighting Russian forces. CBP awarded Teal Drones with a $1.8 million contract in fall 2023 to provide those reconnaissance capacities to border patrol agents. That contract is part of a much larger, albeit non-binding, $90 million Blanket Purchase Agreement that CBP established back in 2021 with a few other companies, including defense contractor and drone manufacturer Vantage Robotics, to procure more border surveillance drones.
CBP also gave AeroVironment’s Puma 3 AE drones, which provide reconnaissance, surveillance and intelligence gathering capacities to militaries worldwide, a $5.25 million contract in 2019 for use by border patrol agents.
Indeed, the financial opportunities here could not be clearer for defense contractors: to capitalize, many are offering extensive pilot programs and beta-testing to police and border programs in pursuit of them, or otherwise making major adaptations to their products so that they can more easily be adopted into the commercial sector.
Promotional efforts are to be expected, but some contractor pushes have gone to excess. Through extensive outreach, Skydio has effectively turned many police officers into evangelists for their product. These officers not only test Skydio products and recommend them to other police departments; some have appeared in Skydio’s promotional materials, and have even helped Skydio try to get Federal Aviation Administration waivers, in moves to skirt existing regulations on how their drones are tested and flown.
An ethics crossroads
Weapons contractors have forged a pipeline bridging the products developed for conflicts abroad, and growing demand back home for adjacent technologies.
The visible proliferation of military-derived tech has sparked public debate regarding the extent these technologies should be normalized outside military use. On one hand, much of this burgeoning generation of war-borne surveillance tech has legitimate uses. Many police considering using drones as first responders, for example, say doing so can cut down response times, saving lives in the process.
On the other hand, the tech’s collective privacy risks are hard for many to ignore. Stingray devices, for example, can intercept the data of all phones in a given area — prompting concerns that Americans’ data have been collected indiscriminately. Amid fears their presence at protests could have a chilling effect on the right to assembly. Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.) has introduced legislation that would bar military grade drones from surveilling protests.
As weapons contractor-fronted drones take to the skies, war-borne surveillance tech’s propensity to render civilians adversaries in their own communities deserves continued scrutiny.
The Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) not only spends significantly more space discussing and developing an approach to the Western Hemisphere than any recent administration, but it also elevates the Americas as the primary focus for the administration — a view U.S. Secretary of State and national security adviser Marco Rubio iterated shortly prior to his first international trip to Central America.
The NSS lays out a specific vision of how to approach the Americas described as “Enlist and Expand” — by “enlisting regional champions that can help create tolerable stability … [and] expand our network in the region… [while] (through various means) discourag[ing] their collaboration with others.”
While finding reliable partners is crucial to promoting U.S. regional interests, the Trump administration’s approach is short-sighted and runs the risk of creating long-term backlash that could undermine U.S. interests and cooperation across the Americas.
From benign neglect to the Trump Corollary
Latin America and the Caribbean have frequently been an afterthought in U.S. foreign policy, with more attention paid to global hotspots like Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. However, even before taking office, analysts were discussing a marked shift in what a Trump 2.0 approach to the region would look like.
Not only did Trump rapidly fill his foreign policy team with established Latin Americanists and name ambassadorial appointments to posts in the Western Hemisphere — naming 10, including to Canada and the Organization of American States, by the end of 2024 — but also quickly taking up issues related to regional affairs. This has included the administration pushing back against Chinese engagement in the Americas, calls to “retake” the Panama Canal, a harsh line on immigration, lower tariffs than other regions, taking a hardline on Venezuela, and a large of number of senior level visits to the region.
All of these actions have led analysts to announce the emergence of a “Donroe Doctrine” — a play on the “Monroe Doctrine” which declared the Americas off limits to extra-Hemispheric powers, but has become affiliated with U.S. interventionism and imperialism by many in Latin America and the Caribbean. Trump himself has embraced the Monroe Doctrine moniker. Just days before the release of the 2025 NSS, he released a presidential proclamation on the anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine in which he declared the reaffirmation of a Trump Corollary to the “legendary” Monroe Doctrine — a position that was reiterated and outlined as part of the 2025 NSS.
While there is much debate about what the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine will entail — beyond the enlist and expand description and maintaining U.S. hegemony over extra-hemispheric actors — there is a line in the NSS that highlights a key tenant of Trump’s actions so far in the region: “We will reward and encourage the region’s governments, political parties, and movements broadly aligned with our principles and strategy.”
Notably, this line highlights a key tension — not only will the administration work with existing governments, but also with political parties and movements. And on this issue, the Trump administration has made a stark shift from recent administrations. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has opted to support democratic movements in Latin America but has rarely sought to shift the outcome of an election in the region directly.
However, since taking office, Trump has weighed in on several elections in the region and even taken actions that appear designed to signal support to one political party or another. This has included his vocal support for Javier Milei in Argentina along with a proposed $20 billion bailout to support Milei in the country’s midterm elections as well as voicing his preference in the recent Honduran election while releasing former President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted of drug trafficking in the United States. Similarly, we have seen the administration weigh in on efforts to prosecute former presidents in both Brazil and Colombia. And more recently of course, Trump has escalated rhetoric and action in an apparent attempt to oust Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro.
While the NSS notes that the United States “must not overlook governments with different outlooks with whom we nonetheless share interests and who want to work with us,” the approach so far has focused on rewarding those with similar positions while punishing countries that disagree with the administration. Interfering in the domestic politics of Latin American countries may not be entirely new, but this element stands out as a key component of what constitutes the new Trump Corollary.
The inevitable political pendulum
The approach of finding regional champions with which to cooperate and then expanding it to a broader group runs into a core challenge — politics in Latin America and the Caribbean have been known to alternate widely between the left and right. This phenomenon is oftenreferred to as a political pendulum triggered by shifting voter preferences on issues related to inequality, crime, and other key issues. However, while usually driven by domestic political considerations, the swings in Latin America’s politics can impact foreign affairs.
One stark example of how the political pendulum has influenced U.S.-Latin America comes from Argentina. While the Trump administration has sought to improve relations with the country under Milei, relations in the 1990s were particularly close — with the relationship being so close that then-Argentine President Carlos Menem referred to them as “carnal.” However, the political pendulum swung away from Menem in Argentina and U.S. relations with the country severely deteriorated under the Kirchner governments of the 2000s and 2010s.
While political swings have traditionally occurred in Latin American politics, the Trump Corollary’s component of interfering in domestic affairs risks exacerbating the degree to which political backlash may occur — a move that would undermine the enlist and expand strategy laid out by the administration. Even since taking office, Trump’s hardline international tactics have provoked push back from constituents abroad — in countries including Canada, Brazil, and Panama — that have undermined the administration’s own objectives.
Over the longer term, pushing hardline policies in the region will create political backlash that results in the elections of parties that do not want to cooperate with the United States. This backlash will be all the stronger if these parties feel as though the United States has actively campaigned against them and interfered in their domestic political opportunities. While supporting democracy abroad may anger dictators, only supporting certain political groups or leaders will lead to significant foreign policy hurdles in democratically elected societies when the political pendulum inevitably swings in the other direction.
Building a lasting coalition
If the United States wants to counter Chinese influence in the region and improve relations with countries in a way that last, it needs to develop partnerships that run across the political spectrum in every country in the region and recognize that there will be times where agreement will not be universal.
Enlisting and expanding needs to focus not on political ideology or short-term objectives, but rather on developing deep and lasting ties with civil servants and the general populations of countries across the region. This creates less incentive for anti-Americanism to play a role in the political swings within countries.
However, if the Trump administration resurrects a ghost of Monroe that interferes in the domestic politics of the U.S.’s neighbors, opposing parties will benefit from tapping into strains of anti-Americanism and highlight U.S. intervention in their campaigns — thus undermining the U.S. interests.
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