It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Image by Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken/Wikimediacommons, licensed via CC BY 2.0
Could it be put down to a measure of confidence on his part? On this occasion, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had, in the Wing of Zion, been less cautious in making a journey to Washington through European airspace. In September 2025, French airspace was avoided during a flight to New York. Most European states, with occasional hiccups of complaint, remain signatories of the Rome Statute, that document founding the International Criminal Court (ICC). The Israeli PM, along with his former defence minister Yoav Gallant, have extant arrest warrants for alleged war crimes in Gaza.
This confidence might have been instilled by the removal of Karim Khan as the Court’s chief prosecutor, who faced allegations of sexual misconduct made by a member of his staff. The result arose from a majority vote of the Court’s member states – 82 in favour of removal, 13 against, with 15 abstentions. The decision was reached on July 24 at an emergency session at the UN headquarters in New York.
Khan has certainly had his problems at an organisation that even optimists can describe as dysfunctional. The Independent Expert Review in 2020 made numerous findings, including “low morale in Chambers.” This included the absence of opportunities for promotion, a perceived “degree of arbitrariness or lack of consistency in management decisions” and “instances of harassment and bullying by some Judges, which have not been sufficiently tackled”. The Office of the Prosecutor was also governed by an “unclear” regulatory framework and a working environment marked by “personality-driven working methods”, with a rampant perception about “a lack of accountability”, notably at the higher levels.
Khan’s own promised efforts to reform his office made little headway. Then came an investigation into claims made by Sarah (as identified by CNN), a lawyer from Malaysia who had worked for the ICC since 2017, and as Khan’s assistant from February 2023 that she had been allegedly harassed and subjected to non-consensual sexual acts by the prosecutor.
In November 2024, the ICC sought an investigation by the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) into “alleged misconduct by the ICC prosecutor” after the complainant refused to cooperate with the ICC’s own investigative body. Curiously enough, the OIOS has no formal mandate for such a function, and certainly none stipulated under the Rome Statute. Khan took a leave of absence pending the OIOS investigation in May 2025. In December 2025, the findings of the OIOS investigation, which covered one allegation of “unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature” and abuse of authority, and three allegations of retaliation against members of the Prosecutor’s office, were received by a panel of expert judges appointed by the Bureau of the Assembly of the States Parties (APS).
In March this year, the Bureau received the findings. Judges Leona Theron of South Africa’s Constitutional Court, Paul Lemmens of Belgium, and Seymour Panton of Jamaica surveyed and digested the materials reviewed by the OIOS before reaching their firm conclusion: “The Panel is unanimously of the opinion that the factual findings by OIOS do not establish misconduct or breach of duty under the relevant legal framework”.
This was clearly not to the satisfaction of the Bureau, whose membership seemed disposed to seeking a scalp. The body made a preliminary determination that further examination was warranted, inviting Khan to submit another round of written observations and evidence, with the alleged victim being given a chance to respond. An assessment, drawing from the OIOS report, the broader evidence, the advice of the expert panel and written submissions was duly made on June 8: Khan would be referred to disciplinary proceedings of the Assembly, his suspension from duty taking place with immediate effect. The finding by the judicial experts had been purely decorative to the final decision. The sense of the political had triumphed.
This entire process reeked of what has been described, rather mildly, as one filled with “procedural anomalies”. The notable advocate Sir James Eadie KC had warned the President of the Bureau in a private legal opinion from November 2025 that the OIOS investigators should not have strayed beyond simple collation and recording of “what may appear from documents and who said what”. The judicial experts would have been left with the determination of the facts. “It would be entirely inappropriate in principle for the investigator (in effect the prosecutor of the misconduct charges) also to be the judge.” He also suggested that, at the barest minimum, some judicial process involving an oral hearing before a panel of judges to test the allegations and determine the facts which could be proved beyond reasonable doubt would be required. “It is entirely inappropriate for the determinative function to be undertaken by executive or political bodies.”
Despite efforts to disentangle Khan’s fate from alleged “misinformation” about the nexus between the prosecutor’s decision to issue the warrants and Israeli and US efforts to seek his ouster, such claims tend to sink in the enfolding quicksand of international relations and expediency. Any international body dedicated to the oft impugned concept of international justice remains vulnerable to lobbies of brute power and firm persuasion. The notion of neutrality in this area remains, at best, specious. And while the individual circumstances of Khan’s alleged misconduct remain specific to himself and his accuser, the sexual remains political. Figures who take the reins in pursuing powerful figures and muddying waters of contentment have found themselves facing charges and accusations (dubious moral character, sexually irregular, flesh fiddler).
The moment the Bureau decided to ignore the judicial assessment on the Khan case, it became political, perceived or otherwise. The Israelis were particularly enthused by the allegations against Khan, seeing another addition to their war chest of claims in discrediting him and inflicting a blow against the court’s functions. Israeli journalist Guy Azriel of the TV channel i24NEWS has been open about the fact that “Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar played an active role in efforts to advance the move [to remove Khan]. According to the [senior] Israeli official, Sa’ar oversaw a dedicated task force and employed intensive diplomatic efforts aimed at securing Khan’s removal from office.” Barak Ravid, global affairs correspondent for Axios, reiterates the same claim from the senior official – presumably the same – that Sa’ar and Israel’s network of embassies “have been working to mobilize as many countries as possible to vote in favor of his dismissal.”
Khan’s now former employer has also received a sustained, libellous assault from various non-signatory powers against its office holders and activities, with the United States taking the lead. On February 6, 2025, President Donald Trump issued Executive Order 14203, a muscular measure sanctioning any person or organisation engaged in efforts to aid the ICC “investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute a protected person without consent of that person’s country of nationality.” Protected persons covered in the order included armed personnel, current and former, of the US and its allies, and current or former elected or appointed officials of the US government. Khan was the first to be sanctioned. This was followed by members of the ICC judiciary who have, effectively, been subjected to financial ostracization.
This month, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio beat the war drum against the tribunal in a cranky opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal suggesting that more was to come. Among its supporters, he detected the rank smell of fifth column types – leftists, globalists, Third (for Trump, turd, no doubt) World governments – backing an institution that dared investigate, however weakly, the depredations of power. “Independence is our birthright,” he roundly declared. “We don’t intend to trade it for rule by a self-appointed priesthood of ‘international law.’” The Trump administration had therefore taken upon itself the work along with allies to “dismantle the ICC – brick by brick, if necessary.” No less than the entire reserves of the State Department would be deployed against the ICC and its allies, urging member states to exit the regime altogether.
The termination of Khan’s brief is certainly the removal of one of those bricks. It has sent a jitter and chilling shudder through the international legal establishment, leading to some dramatic, even hyperbolic commentary. “The dismissal of Karim Khan as the ICC prosecutor is perhaps the most significant event in the 24-year-old long institutional history of the ICC,” rues Sergey Vasiliev, professor of international law at Open University in the Netherlands. It posed “the greatest setback to the Court’s efforts to pursue justice in situations implicating major powers and their allies not party to the Court, including the US, Israel and Russia.”
Despite the bureaucratic decapitation, the warrants continue to be active, and member states have thus far not indicated a willingness to exit the ICC family. But it remains undeniable that international justice, whatever Khan’s conduct, has been bruised and tarnished by political dictates. Eadie’s sober advice should not be forgotten: “If such officials can be removed or disciplined without a proper adjudication of the allegations against them, against the political context, the integrity of the ICC and its perceived integrity will be fundamentally undermined.” As, indeed, it has been.Email
Social media is not conducive to nuance. In the interest of reach, cut and dried positions are more effective and binary moral judgement expected. This leads to over-simplification of complex issues, and to skipping over facts inconvenient to your chosen narrative.
There are issues affecting two high-profile people where it is worth considering the detail before coming to a firm view – and in doing so perhaps acknowledging that we may not have sufficient information to make that view more than provisional.
I want to look at the furores around Karim Khan and Delcy RodrÃguez.
Karim Khan has been dismissed as Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, by the Bureau of the Court (consisting of the diplomatic representatives of its member states). This follows a lengthy investigation in which three judges found there was no evidence that met the standard of criminal proof, set against member state committee reports that argued in effect that in cases of workplace harassment, the standard of criminal proof is not applicable.
The essential background is that Khan had requested and obtained arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and two Israeli ministers, pursuant to charges of war crimes against them.
The allegations against Khan did not emerge until after the Netanyahu arrest warrant.
The effort to remove Khan was undoubtedly promoted within the ICC structures by those governments aligned with Israel. The Israeli government itself appears to have been actively pushing for Khan’s removal.
The very well-connected Israeli journalist Guy Azriel, from right-wing Israeli TV channel i24NEWS, has posted that a team of Israeli diplomats was involved in promoting the allegations against Khan. Azriel is a former Israeli diplomat himself and well plugged in.
The ICC has of course suffered from massive pressure from Israel and the United States, with sanctions applied to its judges and personal threats made directly against both judges and staff.
Karim Khan has stated that his family were threatened by Israel. But just as I noted that the allegations against Khan only emerged after the obtained arrest warrants against Netanyahu, we should note that Karim Khan only spoke about this after the sexual allegations.
Yet none of this makes the allegations against Karim Khan automatically untrue. All of that could be true, but the sexual harassment genuine.
That is the viewpoint of Em Colquhoun in this opinion piece in the Canary. Colquhoun also notes correctly that the ICC has a long history of pro-Western narrative bias in its targets for prosecution, and ludicrously targeted Hamas figures for prosecution as “balance” to the Israel warrants.
On December 3 2023 I wrote extremely critically of Karim Khan:
I saw the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court shuttled around Israel and the West Bank in a fleet of armored Toyotas, looking like the most arrogant of VIPs, while refusing to act against Israel and seeking to “bothsides” the genocide unfolding before our eyes.
I realised that Karim Khan KC, brother of an ex Tory MP, himself should by rights be charged with complicity in war crimes.
Karim Khan is not a standout crusader for justice who sought to redress the balance of ICC prosecutions. He only sought the Netanyahu charges when the war crimes of the Israelis in Gaza became so blatant that they could no longer be avoided. The limited number of warrants in circumstances where the entire Israel cabinet and senior IDF command are plainly implicated in Genocide, alongside thousands of soldiers, is glaring. But Khan did appear assiduously to be pursuing the warrants against Netanyahu, Smotrich and Ben Gvir, and Israel was sufficiently worried to actively seek to displace him, with eventual success.
I part with the Canary article where it argues that where the truth of the sexual abuse allegations is not plain, the appearance of impropriety is sufficient to warrant dismissal.
What? This is extraordinary. “It doesn’t matter if you did it, it looks like you could have done it” is an extraordinary measure of guilt. What does it mean in practice?
In my diplomatic career, I frequently travelled in many countries and to many conferences with female staff who often were subordinate to me, and we would quite normally stay in neighbouring hotel rooms. I never had any non-professional relationship with any of the staff concerned and no allegation was ever made against me. But if one had been, I don’t see how I could have avoided Colquhoun’s appearance test.
What would be the consequences in practice? A man could never be alone in a room with a junior colleague, could never travel for work with one? Otherwise there is the appearance of impropriety?
This is nonsense. It is not just nonsense, it is nonsense of a return to Victorian societal standards and actually a threat to the advances in women’s professional status.
The problem with the conveniently timed allegations against Khan is that we have seen the playbook often. The state weaponises sexual allegations, and the agency of apparently left-wing commentators like Colquhoun, to undermine and even destroy those whom the state sees as a threat – as Khan had somewhat unexpectedly become.
Let me give you a personal anecdote.
When I was attempting to stop the acceptance of intelligence from torture by Western intelligence services in the War on Terror, I was suddenly faced with 18 disciplinary charges. They were sprung on me at a meeting in FCO personnel department, where I was told that they would be investigated if I did not accept reassignment to a less controversial Ambassadorship.
I did not accept and an investigation commenced.
One of the charges was that I had extorted sex from visa applicants. I was astonished by this accusation. After months of investigation I was eventually faced with a visa application form as the evidence against me. It had written on it – I do not know by whom, but not by me – “Ambassador says approve”.
The application form was for a young lady named Albina Safarova – a person I had never met in my life. Furthermore it eventually transpired Ms Safarova had not made any complaint against me and had not claimed I had ever met her. The only “evidence” of any kind was “Ambassador says approve”, written by an unknown hand on an application form.
There is more. I started to get messages from many people who had worked for me. It became obvious the FCO was systematically contacting all the women I had worked with in my 22-year career with them, and was encouraging them to make accusations against me.
They could not find one person to accuse me. Many of those contacted still worked for the FCO. It was made plain that their employer would like them to make complaints, yet none did.
In my own case, I know for certain that the state fabricated a sexual abuse accusation against me because I was seen as having become a threat.
This happened to me in 2003. I suspect in today’s peculiar atmosphere the state may have had more success in getting me completely cancelled, despite the complete lack of relevant evidence and the absence of any woman actually accusing me of anything. Doubtless there were situations where Em Colquhoun could have discerned an appearance of impropriety, even though nothing actually happened.
I was eventually cleared of all 18 charges. It is impossible accidentally to make 18 separate accusations against somebody, all of which turn out to be untrue. I was disciplined for having revealed the allegations existed, and eventually forced out.
I subsequently saw sexual allegations weaponised against close personal friends of mine, each of whom was seen as a threat to the State – including Julian Assange and Alex Salmond. I know that I was innocent, and everything I know of their cases makes me believe those two were also. Otherwise, you have to believe that people who have dedicated their lives to anti-imperialist causes are routinely, sexual psychopaths. This is akin to believing Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite.
You would also have to explain why Murray, Assange and Salmond have faced formal investigation when nobody on the Epstein list has – and then further explain why all the resources of the Deep State, fully deployed, were unable to convict the anti-Imperialists.
We do not know how events in the ICC will play out. There is no doubt whatsoever that the UK, EU and allies will seek to obtain the appointment of a Zionist prosecutor who will deprioritise or even drop action against Netanyahu. I expect they will succeed; but we shall see.
I do not know the truth about the Karim Khan allegations. It is important to repeat that. But I am deeply, deeply suspicious of their timing. Any abuse of power imbalance at work, if it existed, is very bad. It has come to be a part of the narrative surrounding the ICC’s actions against Netanyahu. We also have the facts of the Genocide in Gaza and Lebanon, and the scale of the everyday sexual abuse of Palestinian detainees.
So we have potentially two wrongs, the just resolution of which has come into conflict through circumstance and timing.
The first potential wrong is an individual instance of sexual abuse in the workplace by Karim Khan. I do not know if this is true or not. But I do know it has been weaponised by those seeking to stymie the investigation of the second wrong. The second wrong is Genocide and war crime on a mass scale. I do know for certain that this is real.
If pursuing the first alleged wrong does indeed come to prevent justice for the definite crime against humanity, it is difficult to see that as a desirable outcome.
Now, gentle reader, I give you an elegant segue. Let nobody think I do not work at my writing.
Just as Karim Khan was removed as prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Venezuela announced it was withdrawing from it. Left-wing commentators immediately seized on this as further evidence that Venezuela is under Trump’s direct control. Yet the withdrawal decision was pronounced by new Foreign Minister Felix Plasencia, a man of impeccable left-wing credentials who survived Chávez’s extremely thorough purge of the diplomatic service and earlier served as Foreign Minister under Maduro. The reasons Plasencia gave were impeccably left-wing and entirely valid, relating to the ICC’s Western bias and disproportionate action against leaders from the Global South.
If Venezuela had done this a year ago, it would have seemed a move consistent with the values of the Bolivarian revolution. But happening now, it all seems too convenient that it aligns, in practical effect if not in expressed motivation, with Donald Trump’s campaign against the ICC. It does so at a time when US and Israeli troops have been in the country providing earthquake relief.
The presence of the Israelis had sparked the first demonstration in Caracas by hitherto loyalist Chavista elements against a policy of Delcy RodrÃguez’s government.
There has been much written recently about the appropriation of Venezuelan oil revenues by the Trump administration. This remains an entirely illegal arrangement, with no founding agreement by the Venezuelan government and based on straight military force. The US still has naval ships off the Venezuelan coast to intercept any tanker not carrying oil to a US Treasury-approved destination.
The USA has been illegally selling Venezuela’s oil. It has not physically occupied the oilfields, but Venezuela has been filling tankers with oil for which the US Treasury has collected the payment. Trump has boasted repeatedly of the huge amounts of money his administration has made from Venezuelan oil. The Financial Times this week ran an article on Venezuela’s missing oil money.
The answer to this question is a prime example of the truth taking us away from the simple narrative that gives a comfortingly clear picture. The answer will surprise you. I have direct first-hand knowledge of this from my time in Venezuela and from access to the highest levels of government there.
The US Treasury has been paying Venezuela its oil revenue regularly and promptly. It has been paying 97.5% of it into the Venezuelan treasury within one week of receipt. 2.5% of it has been retained by the US Treasury as a “fee”. The idea of a transaction fee for illegal military seizure of control of the asset is a blatant racket, but that is the extent of the American depredation.
So the total amount the USA has stolen from Venezuela is about $300 million to date, not the billions Trump has claimed. In fact the US naval operation to blockade Venezuelan tankers (and kidnap President Maduro) will have cost much more than the money the US has made from its illegal venture. It is however not in anybody’s interest to say so, of which more in a moment.
There had been an initial period when the money was going to a personal account in Qatar rather than the US Treasury, and no doubt at that time Trump was considering what he could get away with. But that only lasted a couple of weeks, and that money was recovered quickly into the new arrangement.
I can only state for certain that 97.5% was being paid over within a week for the first four months of the period, until I left Venezuela. But it is my understanding that it has continued smoothly.
There is more. The US has been selling the Venezuelan oil at a 5% discount to the world price. How you calculate a benchmark price for Venezuelan crude before applying the discount I am not sure, as the stuff is quite particular. But – and here we get into the realms of inconvenient facts a lot of my audience will not wish to hear – this compares to the 15% discount that China was imposing when it was the main recipient of Venezuelan crude.
On top of which, China was making payment not within a week, but with a delay of months and sometimes years. Plus China was deducting money at source for repayment of Chinese loans to Venezuela. These loans were genuine and for excellent infrastructure projects, but obviously the deduction of repayments from oil revenues hit Venezuelan government fiscal flexibility hard.
So the truth is that Venezuela is (even apart from the price bonanza from the Hormuz closure) getting a great deal more revenue from the United States than it was from China (and Russia) and getting it much quicker. That is an inconvenient fact if ever I heard one.
The RodrÃguez government does not trumpet this, as it does not wish to appear complicit or happy with a client relationship that is imposed on it and illegal. The Trump Administration does not trumpet this, because it wishes its base to believe it is making billions out of Venezuela, not engaged in a military-led venture that is actually costing billions.
That is why the whereabouts of Venezuela’s money is a mystery. I know the answer because I was told and shown at the highest levels of government. I actually both phoned and emailed the Financial Times to try to tell them the answer to their front-page question, but they did not reply to me.
However, the basic and rather dull answer is that Venezuela’s money is in Venezuela.
I would add to this a point which Delcy RodrÃguez made to me personally. Venezuela had never voluntarily stopped selling oil to the United States. The USA imposed sanctions on Venezuela, not the other way round. In a free world, the United States would be the largest destination for Venezuelan oil and is the country’s most obvious economic partner – a point made by Anya Parampil in her excellent book Corporate Coup: Venezuela and the End of US Empire.
The difficulty is the United States’ unwillingness to engage in fair trade with anyone.
What Venezuela desperately wants is the normal ability to trade fairly with any other country, including the ability to supply Cuba. It has been prevented from doing so because the Western powers are desperate to destroy any state running an alternative economic model – which if capitalism were genuinely an economically superior system, they would have no need to do. China did not impose the sanctions on Venezuela, but exploited its advantage from them.
The USA has imposed a classic Imperialist resource-extraction operation.
The imperial extraction does not lie primarily in the headline price paid for the crude. The oil can only be sold through and to US-approved companies, which capture the larger margins in trading, refining, shipping, financing and marketing. Venezuela receives payment for the raw commodity (minus the small fee), but is locked out of the higher-value stages and denied the freedom to sell to other buyers. That is how classic resource imperialism frequently works: control of commodity access, logistics and the value-added chain rather than simple open seizure of the export revenue.
There was a stunning Freedom of Information release last week of a CIA note that indicated that the CIA did not believe that the Venezuelan elections from 2006 to 2020 were significantly affected by election fraud. So the imposition of the vast bulk of Western sanctions which crippled Venezuela over that period – and at one point caused devastating famine and mass emigration – were knowingly based on a lie.
My own investigations in Venezuela led me to believe that opposition claims that they won the 2024 Presidential election – claims promoted by all the Western powers – were equally untrue and the “evidence” incomplete and often forged.
Venezuela has obtained very little by way of sanctions relief from the Trump administration, and appallingly it has received no sanctions relief at all from Western nations to help it cope with the devastating earthquake. This has made it difficult for the relief charities to pay for anything, move goods and equipment to Venezuela or operate there at all. The Western media has delighted in making claims of government inefficiency in earthquake response, while never mentioning the crippling effect of decades of sanctions on government supply chains.
In truth, the resilience of Caracas has been extraordinary. I am in contact with the team I assembled in Caracas and a score or so of other friends and contacts. Mobile phone contact was never cut to the large majority and only for a few hours to those who did lose access. Electricity has been almost constant, and so has potable water supply.
What is more, the massive Russian- and Belarusian-built social housing blocks – which I had greatly feared would have collapsed with huge loss of life – withstood the earthquake comparatively well. It was the modern glass and steel blocks in the wealthier areas which proved most prone to disaster. That may be due to those areas being on flatter alluvial land more prone to shake.
Of all the decisions for which Delcy RodrÃguez has been criticised from the left, the one with which I struggle most has been the acceptance of an Israeli earthquake relief team, with accompanying IDF PR personnel. For Israel, which buried tens of thousands of children under rubble, to be parading its assistance in digging people out of rubble, is too much for me.
But consider this. You are Delcy, and your capital has just suffered as much catastrophic damage and loss of life in an hour as Gaza did in many months. You have thousands of people potentially alive and desperate to be dug out. Could you turn down any offer of specialist relief in those circumstances? It was an agonising decision to be forced to make. I received a personal assurance from the Venezuelan government that the Israeli deployment was temporary and had a time limit which, if true, means they have already gone.
I have struggled with this. But ask yourself this question before you condemn, as I asked myself:
If your own children were buried under rubble, and an Israeli rescue team to hand, would you forbid them to dig your children out? When you have considered that question, then you can condemn the Venezuelan government.
I would not, I think, have allowed the Israelis to come and conduct an exercise where I suspect propaganda value to them was in the event greater than any real help: but I am not on the ground to verify what they really did.
It is worth noting here that repeated speculation that Venezuela is about to normalise diplomatic relations with Israel is so far unfounded. I was told in person by the recently departed foreign minister that Venezuela had made plain to the Trump administration that, in its new enforced relationship with the United States, a red line on the Venezuelan side was the anti-imperialist alignment of its foreign policy. That appears to be the case, as reflected in votes at the UN General Assembly, where Venezuela has not switched to the US camp.
Delcy RodrÃguez’s point that Venezuela never voluntarily stopped trading with the USA is also relevant to its position with the IMF. Venezuela never left the IMF. Chávez said that he would, but then changed his mind. Maduro also did not leave the IMF.
Contrary to much disinformation, Venezuela has therefore not rejoined the IMF. Nor has Venezuela accepted an IMF loan, a Structural Adjustment Programme, or any IMF budget-monitoring mechanism. What Venezuela has done is to take some 500 million dollars in Special Drawing Rights to which Venezuela was entitled. Access to these had been blocked by financial sanctions, which were voided by the slight easing under Trump.
The money was Venezuela’s share of a general release to assist developing countries through the COVID years. Venezuela was simply blocked from its share. It was, in effect, Venezuela’s own money. To portray taking this as some “betrayal” of socialist values is ludicrous.
I have no reason to adjust the assessment of Delcy RodrÃguez that I reached after careful study. In fact I have the strongest reinforcement, in that I now know with absolute certainty that Delcy RodrÃguez did not betray Maduro. I have had direct access to documentary, eye-witness, audio and visual evidence that conclusively showed me that:
Maduro was aware of his likely kidnap and stood down armed resistance.
In the preceding weeks RodrÃguez had been approached to cooperate with Maduro’s removal and had adamantly refused.
On the night of his kidnap RodrÃguez was present, furious, refusing US overtures and seeking every avenue for Maduro’s immediate release.
I believed these things to be true from first-hand accounts before I wrote my last major article on Venezuela: I am now absolutely certain they are true.
Venezuela abjured the path of armed resistance to the poised US forces. Venezuela is a quarter the size of Iran, has far weaker armed forces and is within direct bomber range of the United States. It is a pacific country and has chosen to try to ride out the Trump storm, while maintaining the key benefits of the Bolivarian Revolution – especially free and universal education, free healthcare, widespread pensions and the commune system.
The Chavista system already drew much criticism from the international Left for simply aiming to spread these social benefits from oil revenues, while allowing capitalists to dominate the rest of the economy. Communal ownership of means of production and distribution was growing organically, particularly through the communes, but there has been no fundamental change to the capitalist sector in a mixed economy. It is this factor which makes accommodation with US capitalist firms possible.
This is dependent on the Venezuelan government tolerating US predator capitalism and the US government tolerating Venezuelan wealth distribution. This is the basis on which RodrÃguez has been avoiding war and waiting for Trump to pass. It is the basis on which Trump has been exerting no pressure for regime change in Caracas, where he said again this week that Venezuela was “not ready” for early elections.
Where there is room for genuine criticism from the Left is that this approach effectively cooperates with imposed American imperialism in key economic sectors; that the US is seeking to expand its monopoly into other Venezuelan mineral resources; and that imagining this is temporary and the Democrats would now be any better is probably illusory.
But a devastating war is the only currently available alternative, and that definitely would destroy Chávez’s social achievements.
There is no plain right or wrong answer. All of RodrÃguez’s options are bloody awful, compounded by the rightward shift of Latin American governments and the new US-backed electoral fraud next door in Colombia. Those who have romantic notions of wearing bandanas and brandishing AK-47s in mountains and jungles have for the most part not seen children die in agony. This is not easy.
I have addressed two apparently disparate topics. What unites them is simple. In both cases the available facts are messy, the moral weights pull in more than one direction, and the political incentives of powerful actors are obvious. Social media, and much of what now passes for political commentary, cannot tolerate that. It demands a clear good guy, a clear villain, and the suppression of any fact that complicates the story.
That demand is not moral clarity. It is intellectual laziness dressed up as principle. It produces the spectacle of people who will not look at the timing of the allegations against Khan, or at the actual flow of Venezuelan oil money, or at the evidence of RodrÃguez’s conduct on the night Maduro was taken, because those facts make the preferred narrative less comfortable.
There are truths that conflict. There are sometimes choices in which every available option is bad. Facing that reality, weighing what is known against what is only alleged, and then deciding, is the actual work of political and moral judgement. Declaring the complexity itself illegitimate, and treating those who acknowledge it as morally suspect, is the opposite of seriousness. The age we are in rewards the opposite. That is not a reason to join in. An important concomitant of this viewpoint is that I absolutely have no claim always to be right. If I have guided you through the facts and some key issues around them, and helped stimulate you to form your own opinions, then I am very happy.
This article was originally published by Craig Murray Blog; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.Email
Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and Rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010.
Friday, July 24, 2026
Consequence Without Catastrophe: Why Sport Commands Human Attention
Why can a soccer match make billions of people tense when almost nothing in their daily lives depends on the result? Martina Moneke argues that sport is one of civilization’s greatest inventions: a symbolic form of conflict that creates genuine consequence without catastrophe.
A 2026 FIFA World Cup group stage match between Belgium and Egypt, seen from the south side in the lower bowl at Lumen Field in Seattle, Washington. | Image by SounderBruce via wikimediacommons | This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
I was tense. Not mildly interested. Not casually curious. Genuinely tense.
As the World Cup Final entered its closing minutes, every attack seemed to matter. Every misplaced pass felt consequential. When one team surged forward, I leaned toward the television almost involuntarily. My heart rate rose. I found myself willing the match toward an outcome that, if I were honest, would have almost no meaningful effect on my life. If Spain had lost, my life would be the same. Nothing existential depended on the result. And yet the tension was real. Why?
It is tempting to answer that people simply love sports. But that isn’t really an explanation. It merely restates the phenomenon. The more interesting question is why a symbolic contest between 22 players on a field can produce genuine physiological and emotional investment in billions of people around the world.
What kind of human invention is sport that symbolic stakes can feel psychologically consequential? One answer is that sport may be one of civilization’s most successful attention technologies: a cultural invention designed to organize millions—and sometimes billions—of minds around the same unfolding uncertainty. Rather than simply entertaining us, it synchronizes perception, concentrates emotion, and transforms individual spectators into participants in a shared symbolic reality.
That question leads far beyond soccer. It reaches into anthropology, neuroscience, ritual, warfare, philosophy, and the history of civilization itself. The World Cup may not simply be the world’s most-watched sporting event. It may be one of humanity’s greatest cultural achievements: a way of transforming existential conflict into shared experience—allowing us to feel the intensity of struggle, uncertainty, triumph, and loss without requiring catastrophe.
To understand why sport commands such extraordinary human attention, we first need to understand one of civilization’s greatest inventions: symbolic consequence. Throughout much of human history, the events most capable of synchronizing human attention were those with genuine existential stakes. Warfare, famine, predation, epidemic disease, and environmental catastrophe demanded collective focus because survival depended upon it. Shared danger aligned perception, sharpened attention, and coordinated action with remarkable efficiency.
But as societies became larger and more complex, they confronted a remarkable design challenge: How can a civilization preserve the psychological power of shared stakes without paying the devastating price of perpetual catastrophe? One of humanity’s most elegant solutions was the invention of symbolic stakes—bounded experiences capable of producing genuine attention, emotional investment, and social cohesion without requiring genuine destruction. Sport represents perhaps the most sophisticated expression of this invention: It preserves the emotional grammar of conflict while stripping away its physical destruction, allowing societies to rehearse rivalry without paying war’s irreversible costs.
We often assume that sport commands attention because it is exciting. The reverse may be closer to the truth. Sport has endured across civilizations because it is extraordinarily effective at producing sustained collective attention. Excitement is not merely its appeal; it is one of its functions.
It borrows much of the attentional architecture of existential conflict: opposing sides, defended territory, finite resources, strategic cooperation, temporal urgency, uncertainty, triumph, and defeat. Yet it removes the very feature that makes conflict catastrophic. The contest unfolds within agreed-upon rules, defined boundaries, impartial officiating, and fixed time limits. The conflict is real; its consequences are deliberately constrained.
Between the first and last whistle of a soccer match, an extraordinary transformation occurs. The field becomes a closed ecosystem of meaning. Every possession acquires significance. A defensive stop becomes momentous. A missed opportunity becomes heartbreaking. Time itself seems to accelerate as the final whistle approaches. Although almost nothing changes in the material world for the overwhelming majority of spectators, millions experience authentic tension, anticipation, hope, disappointment, and relief.
It manufactures consequence without catastrophe.
This simple observation points to something far more profound than entertainment. It describes a civilizational achievement. Sport demonstrates that human beings need not face existential danger to experience existential emotions. War confronts us with existential stakes; sport invites us into experiential ones. Both organize emotion, but only one leaves cities in ruins. Unlike theater, whose ending is already written, or war, whose costs are all too real, sport uniquely combines symbolic stakes with genuine uncertainty. Transforming conflict into a symbolic experience allows societies to rehearse cooperation, rivalry, sacrifice, resilience, uncertainty, and collective identity within a framework designed to prevent conflict from spilling into the physical world.
The World Cup is the largest expression of this idea ever created. Throughout the match, billions of people voluntarily inhabit the same unresolved future. They attend to the same clock, the same uncertainty, the same possibility of triumph or defeat. In an age increasingly defined by fragmented media and personalized algorithms, the tournament remains one of the few institutions capable of synchronizing human attention on a planetary scale. The World Cup is therefore not merely an escape from reality. It is a refinement of one of reality’s oldest patterns: the human need to gather around shared stakes, shared uncertainty, and a shared future. Civilization’s genius may have been learning how to satisfy that need symbolically rather than catastrophically.
Attention Follows Uncertainty
We do not lean toward the screen when the outcome is guaranteed. We do not hold our breath for the expected, nor do our hearts race for the inevitable. The human brain is, at its core, a prediction engine—constantly modeling the future to navigate an uncertain world. When the future is largely predictable, attention relaxes; the brain conserves energy. But when the future becomes genuinely unresolved, the mind snaps into high gear.
Throughout evolutionary history, uncertainty often signaled danger. A rustle in the tall grass, an unexpected storm on the horizon, an unfamiliar silhouette at the edge of camp—these were moments when the inability to predict the next five seconds could mean death. To survive, humans evolved neural systems exquisitely sensitive to uncertainty. When the future becomes difficult to predict, networks involved in attention, motivation, learning, and decision-making become more active, sharpening perception and pulling consciousness into the present moment.
Sport hijacks this ancient survival mechanism and puts it in a bell jar.
The brain is not merely watching a ball. It is continuously interpreting a dense stream of social information—cooperation, competition, strategy, adaptation, trust, and leadership—that is compressed into a shared symbolic contest. A match is a deliberate machine for generating structured unpredictability. In close contests, the brain treats each new play as evidence bearing on an unresolved future, continuously updating expectations as the possible outcome shifts from moment to moment. Unlike a theater performance or a novel, where the ending has already been written and merely awaits revelation, a sporting event is authored in real time. The actor on stage cannot truly fail to deliver a line without breaking the play; the striker on the field can miss an open net by an inch, forever altering the story that everyone is living together.
Yet uncertainty alone cannot explain the extraordinary power of sport. The world is filled with uncertain events that command almost none of our attention. We do not become emotionally invested in the outcome of a stranger’s coin toss, nor do billions gather to watch an unfamiliar stock price fluctuate. Uncertainty is necessary, but it is not sufficient.
Attention follows uncertainty when uncertainty has been endowed with shared consequence. This is the mechanism by which sport functions as an attention technology. For the length of a match, civilization constructs a closed ecosystem of meaning. That is precisely what sport accomplishes. Within the carefully bounded world of the game, civilization temporarily assigns profound meaning to an otherwise arbitrary sequence of events. Every action acquires symbolic weight. Every pass matters. Every tackle matters. Every shot matters. Not because the physical world depends upon them, but because millions of people have agreed to temporarily inhabit the same symbolic universe. The game has temporarily become its own universe of consequence.
The brain is not merely tracking the movement of a ball. It is reading leadership, cooperation, sacrifice, deception, resilience, timing, and trust compressed into two hours of embodied interaction. Sport, therefore, accomplishes something remarkable. It does not merely manufacture consequence without catastrophe; it manufactures uncertainty without catastrophe. It creates a genuinely unresolved future while ensuring the conflict remains bounded by rules, time, and mutual consent. The emotional architecture of existential life is preserved, but its destructive consequences are held in check.
This is why sport captures us in a way scripted drama rarely can. It offers something increasingly rare in modern life: a domain of absolute rule-bound order that nevertheless yields genuine unpredictability. The rules never change, yet the ending remains unknowable.
When billions of people watch a World Cup match, they are not merely observing a game. They are inhabiting the same unresolved future. Once spectators enter that symbolic world, the players cease to be merely strangers. They become temporary representatives of hopes, identities, and possible futures that spectators have chosen to inhabit. Every pass, every tackle, every shot represents a branching point in a story whose ending has not yet been written. Their collective attention converges not because the movement of a ball is inherently meaningful, but because civilization has temporarily endowed that uncertainty with shared consequence.
The World Cup thus reveals something profound about the human condition. We do not simply crave certainty, nor do we seek chaos. We seek meaningful uncertainty—a future whose outcome matters, but whose consequences need not destroy us. Sport may be one of civilization’s greatest inventions precisely because it gives us that experience, again and again, without requiring catastrophe.
The Grammar of Conflict
Civilizations did not invent sport randomly, nor did they preserve its form by accident. Across centuries and across cultures separated by oceans and eras, sport has consistently retained a remarkably similar family of structural features. It is tempting to dismiss these as mere rules of play, but they are anything but arbitrary. They endure because they are precisely the elements that organize human attention around collective struggle.
Together, they form what can only be called the grammar of conflict. Like every language, this grammar consists of a small set of recurring elements that can be recombined into countless different expressions. Its basic vocabulary includes:
Two Sides: The irreducible binary. Before attention can unify, perception must first bifurcate: us and them, self and other.
Territory & Boundaries: A physical space endowed with symbolic meaning, where progress is measured, positions are defended, and movement itself becomes consequential.
Uniforms: The temporary subordination of the individual to the collective. The uniform instantly communicates allegiance, transforming isolated people into a visible coalition.
The Clock: Time ceases to be an abstract continuum and becomes a dwindling resource. Every passing second changes the meaning of every decision.
Rules & Referees: The external authority that prevents conflict from collapsing into chaos. Rules preserve uncertainty while ensuring that the contest remains symbolic rather than violent.
Spectators: Conflict becomes culture because it is witnessed. The audience does not merely observe the contest; it amplifies its significance by investing collective attention in its outcome.
Stakes: Every contest requires something that can be won or lost. The specific prize may be symbolic—a trophy, a championship, national pride—but without stakes, uncertainty becomes mere randomness rather than meaningful drama.
Victory & Defeat: Every sentence in the language of conflict seeks resolution. In a world full of ambiguity, negotiation, and inconclusive debates, the final score delivers a clear ending. Someone wins. Someone loses. The uncertainty is resolved.
This grammar is not unique to sport. War, politics, courtroom litigation, geopolitics, elections, and even many modern video games draw upon remarkably similar structural principles. Each recombines the same underlying vocabulary to produce different kinds of conflict. Sport, then, does not imitate war. Rather, sport and war are two different sentences written in the same underlying language.
The crucial difference is that sport systematically transforms that language. It preserves the generative grammar of consequential conflict while removing its catastrophic consequences. The struggle remains real; the destruction does not. By deploying this grammar within a bounded arena, civilization created a high-stakes language that nearly everyone can intuitively understand. We do not need to be taught how to feel when a team advances into enemy territory as the clock winds down. Our species has been reading this grammar for millennia.
When we sit down to watch a match, we are not learning a new language. We are speaking one of humanity’s oldest ones. Civilization’s achievement was not inventing that language, but teaching it to speak without bloodshed.
The Planetary Ritual
Every four years, something extraordinary happens. For a brief window of time, billions of people—separated by language, ideology, geography, and wealth—voluntarily orient their attention toward the same unfolding reality. They watch the same clock tick down. They react to the same sudden moments of triumph and despair. Strangers across opposite hemispheres inhabit the same symbolic present.
In the early 20th century, the sociologist Émile Durkheim sought to understand what held human societies together. He coined the term collective effervescence to describe those rare, heightened moments when individuals gather around a shared symbol, participate in a common ritual, and suddenly experience themselves as part of something vastly larger than their individual lives. In these moments, the boundary between the self and the group briefly dissolves.
The World Cup may be the largest recurring instance of collective effervescence in human history. This is not merely because sports are popular. It is because civilizations require recurring mechanisms that transform individual attention into collective attention. Durkheim described the subjective experience of this synchronization. The World Cup reveals one of its most remarkable modern expressions. Throughout history, this function has been performed by a relatively small number of institutions. Shared religious rituals gathered villages beneath a single roof. Harvest festivals marked the turning of the seasons. Public coronations reaffirmed political authority. And, most destructively, war forced entire populations to align their attention toward a common existential threat.
As traditional institutions have fractured, the need for shared focus has not vanished. It has simply sought new containers. This reveals one of the defining scarcities of the twenty-first century. Information is no longer scarce; it is overwhelming. Computing power continues to expand. Data accumulates faster than any individual could ever consume it. What has become genuinely rare is something else: shared attention.
Algorithms increasingly optimize for individual engagement rather than collective experience. Media is personalized. Feeds are curated for each user. Millions of people can inhabit the same city while occupying entirely different informational worlds. We rarely look at the same sky, let alone the same screen. We increasingly inhabit parallel realities tailored to our individual interests, anxieties, and desires.
The Olympics and the World Cup represent two different expressions of human excellence. The Olympics celebrate the extraordinary diversity of human achievement, inviting our attention to move among dozens of sports, stories, and champions. The World Cup does almost the opposite. It gathers billions of people around a single unfolding narrative, concentrating attention on a single unresolved future that the world experiences together. Its achievement is not breadth, but convergence.
In this context, the World Cup becomes far more than a tournament. It is a planetary ritual. It remains one of the last institutions capable of resisting fragmentation—one of the few occasions when billions of people voluntarily inhabit the same unresolved future, speak the same ancient grammar of conflict, and experience the same rising and falling tension together, without requiring a single life to be lost. Perhaps this is the deeper purpose of sport. Not simply to entertain us, nor merely to determine who is strongest, fastest, or most skilled. Its greatest achievement may be reminding billions of strangers what it feels like to inhabit the same present together.
I was tense. So were billions of other people. Not because we knew one another. Not because our survival depended upon the outcome. But because, for the duration of the match, civilization had once again aligned billions of minds around a future that none of us could predict.
The Species That Plays
In his 1938 classic Homo Ludens, the historian Johan Huizinga argued that play is not merely an activity contained within culture. Culture itself arises in play and as play. We are not only the species that thinks—Homo sapiens—or the species that makes—Homo faber. We are also Homo ludens: the species that plays. Yet Huizinga’s observation leaves us with a deeper, more intimate mystery. Why do we seek play? Why do billions of people voluntarily spend their time, emotion, and anxiety entering artificial domains of tension?
Consider what we do when we sit down to watch a match, open a novel, attend a performance, or follow an election. We willingly surrender our equilibrium. We allow events beyond our control to elevate our heart rates. We weep over symbolic triumphs and mourn symbolic defeats. We submit ourselves to suspense even when nothing in our immediate survival depends upon the resolution.
If human beings were purely rational creatures driven solely by the pursuit of comfort and security, this behavior would be inexplicable. We would seek only ease, certainty, and predictable pleasure.
Instead, we actively seek tension. The reason touches something fundamental about human consciousness. Humans do not simply seek pleasure. We seek meaningful participation in an unresolved future. To be alive is to exist in time—to stand continually at the narrow, razor-sharp boundary between a remembered past and an unwritten future. Nothing feels more suffocating to the human spirit than a future that appears entirely predetermined, rigid, or indifferent. Nothing feels more thrillingly vital than a future that hangs in the balance: one in which action matters, choices ripple outward, and the ending remains genuinely unknown.
Stories, theater, music, politics, religion, and sport all organize this experience in different ways. They draw us out of the monotony of predictable routine and place us inside moments of meaningful contingency. They create structures in which anticipation intensifies, possibilities multiply, and what happens next appears to matter.
Sport may be the purest version because its conclusion has not yet been composed. The players do not know the ending. The spectators do not know it. Even the institutions that built the arena and established its rules cannot determine what will happen once play begins. When we immerse ourselves in the outcome of a match, we are rehearsing what it means to be alive in time. We reach for an ancient human longing: to care deeply about what happens next, to feel the weight of possibility, and to experience the electrifying sensation that the future—if only for one hundred twenty minutes—is still waiting to be written.
Epilogue: After the Whistle
The whistle blows.
Its sharp sound cuts through the roaring stadium, and in a fraction of a second, the universe of the game collapses. The bench spills onto the turf in jubilation. The losing side sinks into the grass, staring blankly into the sky. On screens thousands of miles away, cameras move across faces streaked with tears and faces radiant with disbelieving joy.
Then, slowly, the dissolution begins. The broadcast ends. Television screens flicker off in living rooms from Buenos Aires to Tokyo. Flags are folded and tucked into coats. Millions of people step into dark streets, board late-night trains, or close their laptops and walk into quietly lit kitchens to make a cup of tea. In a physical sense, almost nothing has changed. The political borders of the world remain where they were two hours earlier. The economy continues along its indifferent axis. The personal burdens, obligations, and quiet heartbreaks that each spectator carried into the room are waiting exactly where they left them.
Yet something real has happened. During the match, the boundaries of individual isolation briefly became permeable. Billions of separate minds, enclosed within private worries and algorithmically curated worlds, agreed to inhabit the same present. They watched the same clock. They reacted to the same collisions and reversals. They held their breath as the same ball descended through the air, even when they hoped it would land in different places.
The final whistle does not merely end a soccer match. It dissolves one of the largest temporary communities of attention ever assembled on Earth. Like all rituals, it leaves behind a peculiar stillness—the stadium empties. Paper drifts across rows of vacant plastic seats. The grass, stamped with the marks of studs and bodies, cools beneath the floodlights. Millions return to their regular lives.
I stopped watching the television. My heart rate slowly returned to normal. I had been tense. And so had billions of others. We did not know one another. We did not all want the same outcome. Our survival did not depend upon what happened on the field. But for a little while, amid an ocean of noise and fragmentation, we had cared about the same unresolved future. And that shared tension had been enough.Email
Martina Moneke writes about art, fashion, culture, and politics, drawing on history, philosophy, and science to illuminate ethics, civic responsibility, and the imagination. Her work has appeared in Common Dreams, Countercurrents, Eurasia Review, iEyeNews, LA Progressive, Pressenza, Raw Story, Sri Lanka Guardian, Truthdig, and ZNetwork.org, among others. In 2022, she received the Los Angeles Press Club’s First Place Award for Election Editorials at the 65th Annual Southern California Journalism Awards. She is based in Los Angeles and New York.
World Cup: A Poisonous Cocktail of Spectacle, Kitsch, and Patriotism
Given all the corruption and scandals, the World Cup doesn’t stand a chance of remaining a showcase of the “beautiful game.”
A person with “Fuck FIFA” painted on their neck during an anti-World Cup pick-up football match in Guadalajara on May 17, 2026. (Photo: Leslie Zepeda)
The World Cup is a photographic image of the world, but it is overexposed. It is blurred though the filters of nationalist propaganda and individual heroics. At play are all the features of geopolitics: power games, big money, troubles with AI, competition at all costs, threats, animosities, and mistrust, to name just a few.
Consider, for instance, the Olympic Games. In the Olympic Games, the rules are clear. No kind of demonstration or political, religious, or racial propaganda is permitted at any Olympic sites, venues, or areas. Individuals, organizations, and nations cannot profit from them, politically or commercially. The goal is to promote friendly efforts and healthy rivalry.
The World Cup, by contrast, is a professional championship with its own changing rules and an open focus on profit for all involved. The national exaltation of the results is expected. The World Cup mobilizes nations around their teams and, especially, around heroes on those teams. As the biggest spectacles on the planet, aside from wars, World Cup matches would make Roman rulers envious.
Ritualized Spectacle
The bigger the spectacle, the more elements of rituals they embrace. According to Émile Durkheim, rituals create a state of collective effervescence, forging emotional unity and reminding people they are part of something larger. That can give individuals a warm feeling of belonging or a blinding patriotic zeal. In The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Wilhelm Reich convincingly depicted how the energies of the masses can be steered, manipulated and exploited.
When it comes to rituals connected to sport events, “togetherness” is demonstrated through repetitive acts, the wearing of various sorts of uniforms, flag-waving, shouting with or without music. The “Viking row” of the Norwegian fans leaves many impressed and others envious. Testosterone is on open display, allowing for the free expression of basic instincts without the label of “uncivilized.” Hero-worship also plays a prominent role, even when the heroes are not at their best. This summer in the United States, the heroes have been Harry Kane, Lionel Messi, Erling Haaland, Cristiano Ronaldo, Kylian Mbappe, Jude Bellingham and others at the top of the list. . Donald Trump and FIFA chief Gianni Infantino, though not actively chasing the ball, have tried but failed to join their ranks.
At the margins but persistently followed by the cameras are the rich, famous, and powerful. Many heads of states traveled to support their national teams. Glued to their screens, spectators around the world could also follow the socializing of David Beckham and Tom Cruise, scrutinize the national insignia embraced by Brad Pitt and his girlfriend, wonder if Mick Jagger has lost weight, eyeball the outfits chosen by the jaded Victoria Beckham, witness Ryan Reynolds’s joy of cheering. and observe Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez conversing. Who can ask for more from a sport?
Whatever else the World Cup delivers, it certainly provides a good amount of kitsch. According to the definition, kitsch appeals to popular or lowbrow taste, it is often of poor quality, using bright and clashing colours, is overly dramatic, immediately grabs attention, and evokes shallow emotions. Two steps forward is novelist Milan Kundera and his concept of “totalitarian kitsch,” which denies the complexities, doubts, and unpleasant realities of human existence by banning dissent, irony, and individuality. Each group of World Cup fans shows dissent only toward the judges when they start waving yellow or red cards at their favorites. Such fans unify against all the others, who are also unifying against all the others. It is blind tribalism at its best.
Money and Power
The World Cup means money.. Tickets prices are soaring. “FIFA recently listed a ticket for the July 19 final at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium for $32,970,” according to Forbes. “In April, FIFA’s resale site listed four seats to the final for a little less than $2.3 million each.”. So, FIFA and the host stadiums are financially thriving, and so are broadcasters, traveling companies, sponsors, advertisers, hotels in America, and pubs around the world. Visitors are spending whatever they can. And before each game, the TV audience in The Netherlands was regularly informed that “this program has been brought to you by Coca Cola.”
Professional football has long been a big business, with players bought and sold at high prices. This practice is called the “transfer system,” and it’s been in effect since 1893, when the English Football Association formally registered players as owned by their clubs. This year’s World Cup features two hero-billionaires, Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi. Others are simply millionaires, earning on-field salaries and off-field payments through endorsements, licensing, appearances, and memorabilia as well as cash returns from any businesses in which the athlete has a significant interest.
Money goes well with power. In football, Gianni Infantino (an Italian, Swiss, and Lebanese citizen) is worth $20 million as of 2026, plus an annual compensation as FIFA president of $6 million per year. He also knows how to choose friends. He tirelessly and shamelessly praises Donald Trump, awarding him the FIFA Peace Prize in a rather tasteless political spectacle that shouldn’t have anything to do with sport. Afterwards, after an intimate phone call from Trump, Infantino decided that a decision of a professional referee wouldn’t stand and American footballer Folarin Balogun could play even after receiving a red card. For a moment Trump was happy, but his outrageous intervention didn’t save the American team, which lost convincingly against Belgium.
In Other Scandals
U.S. foreign policy also played a role in the games. Iran’s team could enter U.S. soil only a day before each match and then had to quickly return after the game to their accommodations in Tijuana, Mexico. U.S. Customs and Border Protection denied Somalian referee Omar Arana entry to the country because of some unspecified security challenge, and FIFA promptly removed him from the tournament.
Artificial intelligence also contributed to the games this summer. Video Assistant Referee (VAR) come under scrutiny following a string of controversial decisions in matches involving several countries, particularly Argentina and Portugal.
For these moves and others, FIFA and Infantino in particular lost a lot of respect. Trump was ridiculed in virtually all corners of the globe. And European trust in the United States and its president dropped, with 81 percent of citizens from eight countries considering America unreliable. But this, too, was an expression of patriotism, of the anti-American variety.
Football is one of the greatest art forms. The ability of a player to manipulate their body like the finest ballet dancer, to do what appears unnatural—a sudden change of direction, the power of a shot or header, athletic grace and strength—comes together in a free-flowing orchestra at its very best… The best players on the biggest stage, cultivating their talents while inspiring national pride, have turned the World Cup into the most iconic sporting spectacle on earth.
Italy’s triumphs in 1934 and 1938 were inseparable from Mussolini’s fascist regime. The 1978 World Cup served Argentina’s military dictatorship as a notorious exercise in sportswashing. And in 2026, Donald Trump’s public intervention… sounded less like a head of state respecting sporting independence and more like a powerful man expecting a favour.
That emotional connection is what makes the FIFA World Cup one of the most powerful and patriotic events in the world…. (it) proves that soccer is more than a game—it is a powerful expression of national pride, capable of uniting millions in a shared sense of identity, passion, and hope.
It would be useful to elaborate more on the word “hope” in this context, but sport commentators don’t have to be experts on all things socio-political. On the other hand, it would be farfetched to expect equal enthusiasm from football fans for both their team and their opponents. Their hearts go first to their own flag and team, and only when their clubs of choice are not playing or have been eliminated can football lovers appreciate the sport as it should be.
Not everyone will go along with the masses and their patriotic enthusiasms. Norwegian football fan Emil Anners Lappen decided, for instance, not to row while thousands of his countrymen directly around him did. Kundera’s totalitarian kitsch describes a political and aesthetic system in which all answers are given in advance in such a way as to preclude any questions. The true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is the person who asks questions and refuses to succumb to mass sentiment, even if those feelings are close to his heart and mind.
This article was originally published by FPIF; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.
The most powerful moments of the World Cup did not happen only inside stadiums. They happened in restaurants, city streets, neighborhood bars, national parks, and conversations between strangers who realized the person standing across from them was not a stereotype. They were a human being.
Millions of people came to North America expecting to find a country they had seen through television screens, political debates, and international headlines. Instead, they discovered something far more complicated and far more meaningful: actual people.
They found families cheering in stadiums. Volunteers helping visitors navigate unfamiliar cities. Small business owners welcoming new customers. Strangers sharing recommendations about their favorite restaurants, parks, and neighborhoods.
For a few weeks, the world did not experience America as an argument.
It experienced America as a place.
And perhaps that is one of the most important things that could have happened.
The World Cup has always been about more than soccer. It is a celebration of national identity, but it is also one of the largest human gatherings on earth. It creates moments where cultures meet, curiosity replaces suspicion, and people discover that the differences they imagined are often smaller than the similarities they share.
During this tournament, millions of visitors encountered the United States not through political narratives or social media conflicts, but through direct experience.
They walked our streets. They explored our cities. They visited our natural landscapes. They tasted our food. They encountered our contradictions.
And yes, they encountered some very American forms of excess.
International visitors were fascinated by our enormous grocery stores, massive restaurant portions, and the sheer scale of places like Bass Pro Shops and Buc-ee’s. They photographed hotel ice machines. They debated the cultural importance of ranch dressing. They laughed at our tendency to make everything bigger.
Some of it was funny because, honestly, some of it is a little ridiculous.
But beneath the humor was something more important. They were experiencing a culture that is creative, diverse, and constantly evolving.
Every country has traditions that seem unusual from the outside. Every society has things that make visitors pause and ask, “Why do you do that?”
Curiosity is often the beginning of understanding.
And the World Cup gave the world a reason to be curious about America.
Some of the most memorable moments of the tournament had little to do with what happened on the field.
Scottish fans transformed Boston into a celebration of music, friendship, and national pride, filling pubs and neighborhoods with such enthusiasm that locals joked they had nearly emptied the city’s supply of beer.
Norwegian supporters brought their famous row-bow celebration to Times Square, turning one of the world’s most recognizable public spaces into a spontaneous display of joy and cultural pride.
In Atlanta, more than 500,000 visitors arrived for matches and the FIFA Fan Festival. Fans embraced local traditions, documenting their love for American staples like Waffle House and Carolina barbecue. Local businesses became international gathering places where conversations began over shared meals.
In Philadelphia, Brazilian supporters transformed the famous Rocky Steps into a massive celebration of music, dancing, and national pride. Local bars and restaurants experienced crowds comparable to some of the biggest sporting events in America.
Across the country, visitors traveled between host cities and encountered an America that rarely appears in political debates. They found roadside attractions, family restaurants, neighborhood gathering places, and landscapes that inspire awe.
They did not simply attend matches.
They experienced a country.
And perhaps most importantly, they met Americans.
One of the great dangers of modern life is that we increasingly believe we know people we have never met.
We learn about entire countries through headlines. We form opinions about communities through viral videos. We reduce millions of individuals into political categories and cultural stereotypes.
The World Cup offered a powerful reminder that human beings cannot be understood from a distance.
The visitor from another country is not simply a representative of a nation. They are a person with a family, a history, a sense of humor, struggles, hopes, and dreams.
The same is true of Americans.
For many people around the world, America is often encountered through images of political division, economic power, and cultural conflict. Those things are real. We should not ignore our challenges.
But America is also the volunteer helping a visitor find their seat at a stadium.
It is the stranger explaining which hiking trail to visit.
It is the family recommending their favorite local restaurant.
It is the immigrant helping a traveler navigate an unfamiliar city.
In Seattle and Houston, immigrant volunteers played an important role helping international visitors navigate stadiums, training facilities, and local communities. Their presence reflected something fundamental about the American experience: newcomers do not simply arrive in America. They help create America.
This lesson became personal for me through the experience of a close friend.
One of my best friends traveled with his brother from Denver, Colorado, to Guadalajara, Mexico, to attend the Colombia versus DR Congo World Cup match.
When he told me about the trip, I was thrilled for him. Watching a World Cup match in another country is the kind of experience many sports fans dream about. To witness the passion, culture, and energy surrounding a global event firsthand is something truly special.
I was also a little jealous.
I have to confess that.
But his trip forced me to ask myself an important question: Would I have done the same thing?
And if not, why not?
The honest answer is that, like many Americans, I have absorbed certain messages about Mexico for much of my life. We are often presented with images of cartel violence, danger, and instability. We are sometimes encouraged to see Mexico primarily as a place to fear rather than a place filled with millions of people living ordinary, meaningful lives.
Of course, every country has real challenges. But how much of our fear is based on reality, and how much comes from a constant stream of images that prevent us from seeing the full picture?
My friend chose not to let fear make the decision for him.
He followed his passion for soccer. He followed his curiosity. He followed his desire to experience something beyond his own familiar surroundings.
And what did he discover?
Not a stereotype.
A country.
He found hospitality, culture, history, food, music, and people eager to share their home with visitors.
His experience expanded his understanding because he was willing to step beyond the boundaries created by fear.
That is one of the great gifts of travel. It challenges assumptions. It complicates the stories we inherit. It reminds us that no country can be reduced to its worst moments.
Fear can protect us.
But fear can also limit us.
When we allow fear to determine where we go, who we meet, and what we believe, we shrink our world.
When we choose curiosity instead, the world becomes larger.
This is where the ideas of philosopher Karl Popper remain profoundly relevant.
In The Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper argued that free societies are strengthened by openness: openness to new ideas, criticism, diversity, and human exchange.
“We are social creatures to the inmost center of our being,” Popper wrote.
Human beings do not flourish in isolation. We develop through relationships, conversations, friendships, and encounters with people whose experiences differ from our own.
Popper warned about the dangers of the “closed society,” a world built around rigid identities, unquestioned beliefs, and suspicion toward outsiders.
Closed societies seek comfort through separation.
Open societies discover strength through exchange.
A closed society fears difference.
An open society learns from it.
Popper also understood that openness requires responsibility. A free society must defend the conditions that allow freedom to exist. As he famously wrote, “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance.”
A healthy democracy can maintain borders, uphold laws, and protect its citizens while still embracing the diversity and exchange that make societies stronger.
The choice is not between chaos and isolation.
The choice is between fear and confidence.
Few issues reveal this tension more clearly than immigration.
Immigrants have always helped shape America. They have built businesses, advanced science, enriched the arts, strengthened communities, served in our military, taught in our schools, and cared for our families.
Immigration is not a footnote in American history.
It is American history.
The United States has never been powerful because it kept the world away. It has been powerful because it invited people from around the world to contribute to something larger than themselves.
That is not weakness.
That is our strength.
The World Cup demonstrated this in a way that no political campaign could manufacture.
People did not develop a deeper appreciation for America because of a speech or a slogan.
They experienced America through relationships.
They met us.
And being met changed everything.
We often think international relations happen only in government buildings, conference rooms, and diplomatic meetings.
But some of the most important diplomacy happens in ordinary places.
It happens over shared meals.
It happens on city streets.
It happens when someone from another country visits an American landscape and understands why we protect our public lands.
It happens when fans from different nations celebrate together.
The World Cup may have done more to improve America’s image around the world than any carefully designed public relations effort because it allowed people to experience the country without a filter.
Not the America of stereotypes.
Not the America of political advertisements.
The America of everyday life.
A country that is loud, complicated, imperfect, creative, generous, and always becoming.
The greatest lesson of the World Cup is not about soccer.
It is about humanity.
It is about remembering that democracy is not sustained by people who all look alike, think alike, or come from the same places. It is sustained by people willing to build something together despite their differences.
America’s greatest strength has never come from closing itself off from the world.
It has come from engaging with the world.
The World Cup gave us a glimpse of America at its best: a place where strangers become neighbors, where cultures meet and create something new, and where diversity becomes not a source of fear but a foundation for belonging.
The open society is not simply a philosophical idea.
It is a daily practice.
And for a few unforgettable weeks, the world came here and reminded us why it still matters.
George Cassidy Payne, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Rochester-based writer whose work sits at the intersection of politics, ethics, and lived experience. A poet, philosopher, and 988 crisis counselor, he covers issues of democracy, justice, and community resilience.
Milton H. Greene, Marilyn Monroe ‘Ballerina’ sitting, 1954. Photo: Courtesy National Portrait Gallery.
Marilyn and Joe D.
If any, it was baseball that was Marilyn Monroe’s game. In 1954, she married the recently retired, New York Yankees great Joe DiMaggio. She attended games with Joe and was once photographed standing at home plate with a baseball bat on her shoulder. In truth, she knew little about the game and didn’t care about sports – “I’ll leave those things to the men,” she said.
Maybe she chose DiMaggio for his grace – he didn’t run so much run as glide toward flyballs in center field; or maybe his steadiness – in 1941 he set a record for getting hits in 56 consecutive games. But whatever the reason, she picked wrong. After showing up uninvited on the location set of The Seven Year Itch on East 58th Street in Manhattan, he grew incensed watching take after take of the famous subway grate scene and onlookers ogling his wife. Did he think he married Eve Arden? The marriage was over before it barely started.
I went to see Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait, at the National Portrait Gallery in London, the morning after the much-anticipated World Cup football game between England and Argentina. I’m not a big sports fan, and have no attachment to the English squad, but after weeks of public build-up, discussion and expectation, the debacle in Dallas was deflating. I was ready to think about something else and MM seemed an undemanding choice. Little did I guess the exhibition would describe another kind of catastrophe — one more personally affecting than the one that befell English football.
Choosing sides in the World Cup
Though I wanted to be a good ex-pat and root for the American team to win the World Cup, that was impossible. A victory (unlikely though it was) meant a team visit to the White House and Trump crowing that the U.S. was the “hottest” country in the world. And if that wasn’t enough to turn me off the American team, supporters in stadiums chanting “U S A! U S A!” were. They might have been attending a MAGA rally. Trump’s successful overturning of the red card against the American star Folarin Balogun was the clincher. I couldn’t root for a team helped by the cheater-in-chief
England was the natural place to land. I live in Norwich, U.K. and know lots of people who are big supporters of the English squad. It’s nice to fit in. But that too proved difficult. Could I forget English captain Harry Kane’s golf game with Trump? Would he have said about Hitler what he said about the president: “His golf is pretty good to be honest with you.”
Then there’s the matter of the St. George’s Cross, unfurled on playing fields, waved by fans, and painted on faces and bared (mostly male) torsos. In recent years, the red and white banner has become a sign of British chauvinism, racism and xenophobia. A few journalists have said the proudly multi-cultural English club has reclaimed the banner from the far right. But that’s overly optimistic. A few weeks ago, my wife Harriet and I visited the town of Caister-on-Sea in Norfolk. St. George banners and pennants flew from poles at homes and businesses, and atop the light posts on the high street. Unsurprisingly, the town votes mostly Reform UK or the even further right Great-Yarmouth First Party, an offshoot of Restore Britain, led by Rupert Lowe, Nigel Farage’s rebel angel. Among the policies they support are mass deportation of “illegal migrants,” restoration of the death penalty, strengthening Britain’s “Christian heritage,” and banning halal and kosher meat. UK football fans have no business carrying the St. George Cross unless they want to be associated with that.
And finally, there’s the national anthem sung before English games. It has the same melody as the American contrafactum, “My Country Tis of Thee”:
God save our gracious King! Long live our noble King! God save the King! Send him victorious, Happy and glorious, Long to reign over us, God save the King.
Many Brits don’t know the words. When I asked Harriet if she did, she replied “of course!” and sang: “God save our dah-dah king, dah dah dah, dah, dah-dah, God save our King.” But there on the football field in Atlanta, was the English squad, singing every word. You’d think the nation would long ago have retired the song. Imperial nostalgia has for generations crippled the country. It lay behind the Suez debacle in 1956, the elections of Margaret Thatcher, John Major, David Cameron, Teresa May and Boris Johnson, Brexit and the U.K.’s senseless and self-destructive participation in the American wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. The yearning for past, imperial glories (aka crimes) has fortified Britain’s fascist right for a generation and now fuels the rise of the fascist and corrupt Farage. So please, British people, no “victorious” king to “reign over us.” Love your team (and even savvy old Charles) but skip the anthem!
I couldn’t support Argentina either. Though the country was subjected for most of the 19th and early 20thcenturies to dependence on the “British world system,” as Adam Tooze has recently written, that relationship is long over. The country is now governed by the corrupt, autocratic, obnoxious and chain-saw loving President Javier Milei whose politics are a throwback to the years of the military junta and Dirty War (1976-’83). He was recently re-elected after receiving a promise from his friend Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant of a $20 billion currency swap and another $20 billion of private investment. Rooting for Argentina against England was out of the question.
And to be honest, the sight of skinny, pale, Anthony Gordon in the match against Argentina, sprinting toward the goal to tap in Morgan Rogers’ cross was thrilling – I cheered wildly. But just then, with at least 25 minutes left in the game, the English coach Thomas Teuchel, a lean, tough talking German whose last name is uncomfortably close to Teufel (devil), pulled out Gordon and several other attackers and replaced them with a defensive team unable to mount an offense. The result was predictable: almost the entire rest of the game was played near the English goal, the one place on the field were Lionel Messi, perhaps the greatest of all time, had a freehold. He directed the attack and himself teed up two perfect passes for Argentine scorers. Just after the game ended, I bought my next morning, senior-discount, off-peak, day-return (in American “round-trip”) ticket to London.
Disaster pictures
Around the corner from the much larger National Gallery on Trafalgar Square, catercorner to the church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields on St. Martin’s Lane, sits the National Portrait Gallery, established in 1856, and housed in its current premises since 1896. Formerly a staid institution, stuffed with portraits of kings, queens and notables, it has received successive face lifts and lately a new mission – to bring in more tourists, new audiences, and more money. It has obliged in the expected ways: by mounting exhibitions of portraits by younger and non-white artists, and more significantly for the bottom line, celebrity themed and fashion forward exhibitions. Marilyn Monroe on her 100th birthday was a no-brainer.
The material in the exhibition was cleverly organized by photographer and date. While Monroe worked with a few photographers for nearly the whole of her adult life (she died in 1962, aged 36), she mostly moved from one to another: So, the story of her photographic history is also the story of her life. First the teenager was documented by Andre de Dienes and Bruno Bernard; then in her 20s by Cecil Beaton, Milton H. Greene, and Sam Shaw; then Richard Avedon, Alfred Eisenstadt, Eve Arnold, Inge Morath, Bert Stern, and so on.
Monroe was a confident and canny model. Almost from the beginning, she understood the value of establishing a close relationship with her photographers (sometimes sexual) and insisting upon editorial discretion. She would examine contact sheets, circling the ones she liked and crossing out with a marker the ones she didn’t. Sometimes, as in the case of Bert Stern in 1962, she even reviewed the negatives, using a stylus to scratch an X on the ones she rejected, making them unusable. (Stern nevertheless printed these disfigured images after Monroe’s death – some are in the exhibition.) In just a few cases, she allowed photographers to publish images she didn’t like – that was the case with Richard Avedon’s sad Marilyn, titled Marilyn Monroes, Actress, New York, 1957. Monroe knew a genius when she met one.
The exhibition also includes painted homages to Monroe, mostly posthumous. An exception is Willem de Kooing’s Marilyn Monroe from 1954. It’s a good, Abstract Expressionist painting, with advancing reds and yellows held in check by brushy black contours. But it would be hard to call it a portrait; we learn nothing from it about Monroe because nothing is said. The same is true for the famous Warhol images, three of which are in the exhibition. The paintings (made with paint and screens) and screen prints (made with ink and screens) are concerned with celebrity, commodity, repetition, desire and surfeit – but not Marilyn Monroe. Indeed, it’s her disguise that we see — heavy lidded eyes, open-mouthed half smile, yellow hair and beauty mark — not her character or temperament. This is icon, not individual.
Gene Kornman, publicity portrait of Marilyn Monroe as Rose Loomis in the 1953 film Niagara, Wikimedia Commons; and Andy Warhol, Green Marilyn, 1962. National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. Photo: Courtesy National Portrait Gallery, London.
The latter is what we search for in photo after photo of Marilyn but rarely discover. Even in her nudes, she kept herself to herself. There are perhaps glimpses of sorrow in Avedon’s photos, self-reflection in Shaw’s pictures of her and her husband, playwright Arthur Miller, and vulnerability in Milton Greene’s image of Marilyn as a ballerina from 1954. That was the year she became a bona fide star from three films released the year before: the Hitchcockian noir Niagara, and two comedies, How to Marry a Millionaire and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. I still cry from delight and admiration every time I see her, dressed in a pink satin, floor length, strapless gown and matching pink opera gloves, singing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” The song and its performance offer one answer to Marxist-feminist Evelyn Reed’s contemporaneous argument that capitalism progressed “from selling women as commodities, to selling commodities to women.” Marilyn’s fetish-forward production number argues that women should use the promise of sex to trick wealthy men into giving them diamonds. A gift economy is the antithesis of capitalism.
The earliest Warhol picture in the exhibition, Green Marilyn, was part of his “Disaster Series” (1962-67) which represented plane crashes, car crashes, the electric chair, suicides, and similar subjects. They are widely considered the artist’s best works because they appear to undermine the image of the U.S. – still widespread on the cusp of the Vietnam War – as a land of affluence and ease. In 1963, even before the assassination of Kennedy, Warhol said about the series:
The big plane crash picture, the front page of the newspaper: ‘129 Die.’ I was also painting the Marilyns. I realized that everything I was doing must have been Death. It was Christmas or Labor Day—a holiday—and every time you turned on the radio, they said something like ‘4 million are going to die.’ That started it.
Knowing how the story ends — Marilyn Monroe’s suicide by drug overdose — nearly every image at the National Portrait Gallery exhibition is a disaster picture.
Parapraxis on Sutton Place
One work especially brought this home to me. It wasn’t the small paintings by Margaret Harrison (Marilyn is Dead! 1998) and Marlene Dumas (Dead Marilyn, 2008) based upon autopsy photographs. It was the photo by Sam Shaw of her and Monroe’s husband Arthur Miller standing on Sutton Place near their apartment at 444 East 57th Street in Manhattan. Behind them is the Queensboro Bridge. I know that location well because of a childhood misunderstanding, a kind of Freudian parapraxis.
My family lived on the other side of the Queensboro Bridge, in Forest Hills, about nine miles east on Queens Boulevard. I have just a few, but clear memories of Monroe’s death on August 4, 1962. Everybody was talking about it, my parents and two older siblings included. In addition to being famous and beloved, Monroe had married Miller a few years before and converted to Judaism, making her one of us. Though I was just six, I remember my mother crying and the two-word headline of the New York Daily News, “Marilyn Dead.” (It’s possible the latter is a false memory, and I only saw the newspaper headline later. My parents mostly read The New York Times.)
Daily News, “Marilyn Dead,” August 6, 1962; and Wurts Bros., Facade of 444 East 57th Street. 1949. Collection of the Museum of the City of New York, MNY243067. Public Domain.
Soon after that, coincidentally, my father drove with me beside him over the Queensboro Bridge into Manhattan. Exiting the bridge from the lower ramp, he pointed toward the building off Sutton Place where Monroe lived, and I assumed, died. Before then, I’d never thought about death as occurring at a specific time and nearby place.
Though I learned some years later that Monroe died in her little house with a pool in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles and not in her New York penthouse, Sutton place continued for years to invoke for me the actuality of death. Every time I crossed the bridge by bus or car and exited via the 59th Street off-ramp, there it was, 444 East 57th Street. I haven’t returned there in years, but Sam Shaws’s picture of Marilyn and Arthur Miller brought it back to mind.
Monroe’s premature death was the result of multiple factors: illness, miscarriages, spousal abuse, drug addiction, psychiatric mistreatment, professional anxiety, loneliness and depression. Together they caused a tragedy -– that’s what was so vividly staged at the National Portrait Gallery.
World Cup final
A few days after my return to Norwich, Marilyn’s death safely secreted again in memory, I was back to watching football: the final game of the World Cup between Spain and Argentina. What a disappointment! On the Spanish side, there was lots of passing but little finishing; on the Argentine, lots of fouling and copious diving. At one point, the great Messi, after a collision with Spaniard Aymeric Laporte, lay on the ground, stiff and straight as a board, like a child playing dead. He got a foul but not the penalty kick he was hoping for. On another occasion, after Argentina’s Enzo Fernández was rightly given a red card for upending the Spanish Pau Cubarshe, Messi spotted Spanish left-back Marc Cucurella momentarily covering his mouth as he spoke. Messi ran to the nearest referee, pointed to Cucurella, and insisted he be thrown off the field for covering his mouth, a rule drafted to prevent racist abuse. (Messi is white – part Spanish and part Italian; Cucurella said nothing racist). The referees quickly dismissed the ploy. After the game, Messi claimed that “the system was rigged” against the 39-year-old, billionaire footballer.
In the end, Spain, the far better team, prevailed. As important, 80-year-old Donald Trump used up three hours of his limited term of office and respiration, watching a boring game. He also had to endure Gianni Infantino’s ingratiation and the nearly 30 minute half-time show, featuring Madonna’s lip-synced, frozen-faced mash-up of pop and disco; Shakira lip-syncing the FIFA anthem titled “Dai Dai” (“C’mon, C’mon”) dressed in a Hula-skirt; and a somnambulist troubadour Justin Bieber performing his Gospel-lite “Everything Hallelujah.” He wore, naturally, items from his own clothing line: Hoodies $160, sunglasses $200.
Equally gratifying, Trump and Infantino were greeted with lusty boos when they walked on the field after the game to present awards. Then things went from bad to worse for them. First, Infantino wouldn’t let the president by himself carry the 18th carat gold, World Cup Trophy, apparently worried the kleptocrat-in-chief would make off with it. Then after shaking a few reluctant Spanish hands, Trump was ushered aside by team captain Rodri — no yellow card was issued, but the Secret Service must have been nervous. The U.S. president was subsequently edited out of the official Spanish and FIFA World Cup champions photographs.Trump, who two weeks ago called Spain “hopeless” and a country with “bad people,” was beaten. He now praised the country’s team and denied any previous trash-talking: “I have no tension. I have no tension with anybody.”
At about the same time in Argentina, President Milei was mocked for failing to delete his pre-scheduled posting on X declaring a national holiday for “the victory celebrations for the Argentine National Team.” Elsewhere, Palestinians and their allies celebrated the victory of Spain, whose president publicly recognized that Israel’s conduct in Gaza constituted a genocide and said that its president, Benjamin Netanyahu was “a criminal who must be arrested immediately.” For a little while, there were glimmers of justice.
