Global power is in flux. Your daily guide to what comes next.
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Global power is in flux. Your daily guide to what comes next.
By SASHA ISSENBERG
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Paraguay’s head coach Gustavo Alfaro speaks during a press conference in Ypane, Paraguay on June 4, 2026. | Daniel Duarte/AFP via Getty Images
Donald Trump’s so-called Donroe Doctrine has included saber-rattling towards Venezuela, Panama, and Cuba; tough talk towards the leftist leaders of Colombia and Brazil; and overt interference in the elections of Argentina and Honduras.
But when it comes to small, landlocked Paraguay, the Trump administration has deployed a different playbook: assiduous, patient diplomacy enlivened by the government’s newly aligned interests in making the country a hub for U.S.-backed data center projects.
Tomorrow’s World Cup matchup between the United States and Paraguay at Los Angeles’s SoFi Stadium, in fact, is likely to be the most contentious face-off between the two countries this year.
“Unlike Venezuela, or even Panama, Paraguay has historically remained one of Washington’s most willing partners in South America,” said Gregory Ross, a South America specialist at Washington-based geopolitical consultancy McLarty Associates. “Historically, the issue in the U.S.-Paraguay relationship has not been a lack of alignment, but rather attention.”
The U.S. recently opened a new embassy in Asunción, from which diplomats have worked to cultivate a relationship with President Santiago Peña, a conservative economist elected in 2023. He is expected to be in Los Angeles for the match, as is Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who POLITICO reported will lead the U.S. delegation in President Donald Trump’s absence.
If the conversation turns beyond pleasantries and sport, it’s clear what the two men will discuss.
Paraguay shares the Itaipú Dam along the Paraná River with Brazil, and historically sold surplus hydroelectric power from the 14-gigawatt facility — more than twice the size of the U.S.’s largest dam — to its much-larger neighbor at rates that many Paraguayans resented as undervaluing a national resource.
“They can’t put that in a tank and ship it overseas,” Rubio, who visited Paraguay in 2024 on what he claimed was the first visit from a sitting U.S. senator in 40 years, told a Senate hearing last May. “So someone, if they’re smart, someone is going to go down to Paraguay and open up an AI facility.”
The comment “sent shockwaves through Brazil’s policymakers and diplomatic corps,” the São Paulo-based newsletter Brazilian Report revealed at the time. But it also provided a guiding shared interest for the past year of U.S.-Paraguay relations, as Washington tries to pave the way for U.S.-led artificial-intelligence companies to find a foothold in the country.
In December, Los Angeles-based X8 Cloud announced it was investing $50 billion in a Paraguay data center that will draw power from both the Itaipú and Yacyretá dams, the latter of which borders Argentina. The company says the investment will be the largest AI data center in South America, potentially triggering the type of local resistance such projects have encountered elsewhere.
“Data centers are controversial in South America, amid concerns about water and energy use,” said Benjamin Gedan, a former U.S. State and Treasury Department official who now heads the Stimson Center’s Latin America program in Washington.
While the deal is making new friends for the United States in Paraguay, it risks antagonizing South America’s largest country, whose left-wing government Trump has already tangled with over social-media regulation.
“From Brazil’s perspective, the U.S. push for tech companies to tap into Paraguay’s share of Itaipú power may look like patterns seen under the ‘Donroe Doctrine’ elsewhere in the region,” said Ross, “since the equation involves diverting cheap energy once enjoyed by Brazilian industry toward U.S.-backed projects in Paraguay, which also happens to be a closer ideological ally to Washington than is Brasília. “
Any effort to smooth out that much more complicated relationship is unlikely to take place at the World Cup before the Round of 16, the earliest the United States could face Brazil.
Welcome to POLITICO Forecast. For the next six weeks, Forecast will showcase daily coverage of the World Cup, with a global eye to the players looking to win off-field. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at [email protected]. Or contact tonight’s authors at [email protected] or on X (formerly known as Twitter) @sissenberg.
HISTORY LESSON: World Cup history is awash with politics — and politicians — intruding on the football.
For almost a century, leaders ranging from Italian dictator Benito Mussolini to Argentine military junta boss Jorge Videla to French President Jacques Chirac have sought to score political points from the tournament.
This year’s competition is also not the first to be overshadowed by conflict. North Korea tried to upstage the event in 2002 with a bloody naval assault on South Korea, and the Falklands War between Britain and Argentina loomed over the 1982 World Cup.
In 1934, Mussolini viewed a World Cup victory as a way to symbolize Italian might. Brazilian dictator Emílio Médici said that the 1970 triumph was testament to his country’s greatness. Memories of the Falklands provided fraught context to England’s clash with Argentina in 1986, one of the most famous games in the tournament’s history.
In more recent times, Chirac cast himself as a big fan of the all-conquering, racially diverse French national team in 1998. Vladimir Putin exploited the 2018 tournament to project Russian soft power, while Gulf petromonarchy Qatar used the 2022 edition as part of a major nation-building project.
And this year, it’s the politics of MAGA — an ongoing foreign war and domestic immigration crackdown — that are coming back to bite football’s governing body FIFA.
Read the full story by Ali Walker here.
Demonstrators put up posters of disappeared people on police trucks during a protest on opening day of the 2026 FIFA World Cup in Mexico City, on June 11, 2026. | Claudia Rosel/Getty Images
As the opening match of the World Cup kicked off between Mexico and South Africa in Mexico City, thousands took to the streets to protest the administration of President Claudia Sheinbaum, Sophia Cai writes in from the Mexican capital.
They marched toward the historic Azteca Stadium, and began throwing cones, rocks and plant pots into the security perimeter that had been set up by Mexican authorities as the match kicked off at 3 p.m. Eastern time.
Riot police with shields and on horseback tried to contain the protestors who were there for a range of causes including a teachers union and the disappearances of tens of thousands of people in Mexico.
“There are more than 130,000 disappearances in Mexico and the president denies that they are forced,” one protestor told Forecast in Spanish. “There are no resources for mothers to search because they simply search without the support of the government or institutions. So they are alone, like the teachers.”
THE WORLD CUP COMES TO THE MOHAWK VALLEY: When Bosnian refugees started arriving in Utica, New York, in the mid-1990s, it was a down-on-its-heels Rust Belt city that had seen its population crater by roughly a third from a mid-century peak of just over 100,000 residents, writes Paul Demko.
“I thought I came to another war zone when I came here,” said Hanka Grabovica, who arrived in the Mohawk Valley city in 2001 when she was 16-years old, citing the prevalence of boarded-up buildings and garbage on the streets. “Utica was pretty bad back then.”
Grabovica was part of a wave of Bosnian refugees who settled in Utica after fleeing the brutal war in their native country — and its messy aftermath — that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia. Exact figures are tough to pin down, but it’s believed that about 6,000 Bosnians now live in Utica — or nearly 10 percent of the total population.
The city’s unlikely emergence as an epicenter of Bosnian-American culture will probably never be more prominently on display than on Friday afternoon when Bosnia and Herzegovina faces Canada on the second day of the World Cup. It’s just the second time that Bosnia has qualified for the tournament since it became an independent country in 1992.
The dramatic and unlikely way that the country punched its ticket to North America — knocking off four-time World Cup champion Italy via penalty kicks in a one-match playoff — has heightened the delirium among Bosnians from Sarajevo to St. Louis (the largest enclave of Bosnians in the U.S.) to Utica ahead of Friday’s 3 p.m. kickoff.
“Seeing this national team progress to the World Cup is definitely something amazing,” said Sandro Sehic, secretary of the Bosnian American Community Association of Utica, noting that many ethnic Serbians and Croatians who live in the country still refuse to play for the national team owing to lingering tensions from the war. “Bosnia is still struggling politically, socially. There are still so many problems that are still affecting the country.”
The arrival of the Bosnians in Utica has been followed by waves of other immigrants — most notably a large influx of Karen refugees originally from Burma — that have helped revitalize the city. East Utica, once primarily an enclave of Italian Americans, has become a center of the Bosnian community. Last November, a traditional Bosnian fountain called a sebilj — modeled after a famous fountain in Sarajevo — was unveiled in the neighborhood as a symbol of their importance to the city.
“We were very, very fortunate that the Bosnians have claimed this as their home because they reconstructed some parts of our city,” said Rob Palmieri, who served as Utica’s mayor from 2012 to 2024. “It has been a wonderful blend bringing the city back to vibrancy.”
The main viewing party in Utica for Friday’s match, sponsored by the Bosnian American Community Association, is taking place at the 72 Tavern & Grill, a 5,000-plus square foot restaurant that boasts 18 TVs. But there’s widespread agreement that the game will be ubiquitous in Utica on Friday afternoon.
“You’re not going to find too many of the Bosnians working that day,” said Palmieri, a Democrat. “They’re all going to be glued to TVs.”
“The buzz is insane,” added current Mayor Mike Galime, a Republican. “It’s like a once-in-a-lifetime thing.”
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