More than any formal treaty, a memorandum of understanding signed in secret this week in Rawalpindi indicates the direction of American power. On Wednesday, the Florida-based drone manufacturer Powerus announced that it had inked a deal with the Pakistan Army, which is also accompanied by an actual order (not a letter of intent, but an order) a UAS, or unmanned aerial system, of some sort, details and price unconfirmed. The terms of the agreement were not disclosed, but the deal was announced by the company's co-founder and a former US Army special operations veteran, Brett Velicovich, who said the agreement was for "power systems" in Islamabad, and added that he was not allowed to provide any details out of security concerns. The lack of clarity is being very busy. What isn't vague is the timing, or the company doing the deal.

Powerus is in the middle of a reverse merger with Nasdaq-listing Aureus Greenway Holdings, which until recently was primarily known as an operator of two golf clubs outside of Orlando. Upon completion of the merger, in early October, the combined firm will be named Powerus Corp and will be backed by an investment vehicle known as American Ventures, which is a joint venture held by Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. The brothers also have ties to Dominari Securities, which participated in raising about nine million dollars for the deal, and about six percent of the company is held by each Trump son individually. Aureus stock surged by over 50% on one day when the deal was first reported in March.

None of these by themselves is illegal. Private citizens may invest in defense contractors, and the founder of Powerus, Andrew Fox, has made strident noise about the notion that political connections are the drivers behind the company's success, rather than ability, and that the contracts are won on their merits. A spokesman for Donald Trump Jr. said his father was “absolutely not” involved in the Pakistan deal and that he “was a passive investor and had no advance knowledge of the Pakistan agreement.” That's essentially the position taken by the White House, which in a statement by deputy press secretary Anna Kelly said that there is "no conflict. But the optics only get worse: The same firm that's at least partly owned by the sitting president's sons has just landed its first confirmed military order from a foreign army just as Washington is reaching out to the foreign military elite after 20 years of fits and starts with the country.

Pakistan's army did confirm that Pakistan's Powerus delegation led by Velicovich met country's army chief and Chief of Defence Forces Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir to discuss procurement and long-term manufacturing cooperation. Oddly, in the military's own statement there was no reference to the memorandum but to a general discussion on capacity building. That's not uncommon in defense diplomacy, but it is a case in which outside observers are left to wonder both about scale and intent, and in which speculation about political favoritism thrives.

Context matters here. Munir has come into an unusual limelight in Trump's second term foreign policy, when he hosted a rare lunch at the White House last year and was openly thanked by Trump for his role in bringing the short but intense military standoff between two nuclear powers in May 2025 to a close following a terror attack in Kashmir that was followed by an exchange of drone and missile attacks for several days. Since then, Islamabad has sought to diversify its economic and security engagement with Washington, partly as a move to lessen its reliance on Beijing for all the hardware, especially the joint program with China's Chengdu Aircraft Industrial Group for the Wing Loong drone, still overwhelming the country's armory.

For a nation that's still under the watch of the IMF, the value of the money isn't insignificant. The defense allocation for the current fiscal year (which starts this July) was fixed at around 2.665 trillion rupees ($9.4 billion), an additional increase on the 20 percent rise approved the year before after the conflict with India. That expenditure is part of a budget that has been largely defined by conditions that were imposed on a seven-billion-dollar IMF Extended Fund Facility (EFF), reflecting the fact that every single rupee that is channelled to drones or “power systems” is a rupee that is being diverted from somewhere else, which is usually development expenditure, when growth is still lagging and inflation has resurged to double digits.

The land grab is a significant point of credibility for Powerus in the lead up to a public listing on the Nasdaq, and the company has publicly expressed plans to produce over ten thousand drones per month of which an army customer was just the latest. It's also part of a trend: the Trump family's capital has been all but swirling into the drone business this year, from the Israeli drone firm XTEND's 1.5-billion-dollar deal with a Florida construction company to the family's holdings in the state's two largest drone startups, Voltage Aerospace and Cyber Dynamics Inc.It's also part of a pattern: The Trump family's money has been steadily going into the drone business this year, with separate 1.5-billion dollar investments in both the largest drone companies in Florida, Voltage Aerospace and Cyber Dynamics Inc., and the Israeli company XTEND, which was tied up with a Florida construction firm this year.

The awkward query is not whether or not Powerus is a decent drone. Whether foreign governments will increasingly perceive such deals as a quick way to earn the goodwill of Washington rather than simply a business transaction, based on the fact that they seem to be made more quickly the closer they are to the Trump family. Pakistan's interests would be served by strengthening military relations with the USA and Powerus' interests would be served by establishing a military base in South Asia. When the buyer is a cash-strapped government under the IMF microscope, and the seller shares a boardroom with the American president's sons, the burden of proving that's on merit alone is one heaped upon both of them and they can't get much better than a denial yet.