Only days before the 2026 World Cup kicked off, Somali referee Omar Abdulkadir Artan landed at Miami International Airport, where U.S. Customs and Border Protection barred his entry. An anonymous U.S. official alleged suspected terror ties, but other countries don’t appear concerned: after Artan returned to Somalia to a hero’s welcome, it was announced he will officiate the UEFA Super Cup, a major European club tournament, later this year.
The episode became perhaps the most visible example of a narrative that’s surrounded the tournament opening: that the United States is squandering its soft power opportunity. But another way to understand the U.S. government’s behavior is as an intentional expression of its foreign policy preferences to the world and of its own power to its domestic audience. The global stage is being used to communicate that border control is tightening, that official decisions are increasingly discretionary, and that the United States prefers the language of hard power to the soft power benefits such events are typically thought to accrue.
Understood this way, many of the critiques of U.S. behavior may be missing the mark: every complaint about the United States’ lost opportunity for global goodwill is evidence that this communication strategy is working. And it means that those who seek to redirect the United States to a more diplomatic path, or find soft power opportunities beyond the federal government, may need to think creatively about how to do so in a policy environment in which “naming and shaming”-style strategies no longer hold even the limited persuasive power they once did.
The “Own Goal” Interpretation
Artan’s story fit naturally into what has become the narrative of the tournament’s troubled buildup. Brazilian politician and professor Marcelo Freixo, who as the ex-president of Embratur, Brazil’s tourism board, presumably thinks deeply about soft power, cataloged the pre-tournament record in a tweet that described the United States as “putting on a show of xenophobia in an event that should be marked by fraternity among peoples.” Among the incidents he listed, in addition to Artan’s exclusion: Iraq’s star striker held for seven hours in immigration at Chicago O’Hare, Iran’s squad lodging in Mexico rather than the United States where they will play, and Senegal’s and Uzbekistan’s delegations subjected to tarmac searches.
Freixo is far from alone. In the months before the tournament, human rights organizations pressed FIFA president Gianni Infantino on whether the United States could responsibly host at all; the Congressional Hispanic Caucus questioned the administration’s ability to meet the needs of international travelers; and U.S. observers described how immigration policy and geopolitical tension might undermine a generational goodwill opportunity. On June 11, as the World Cup’s opening whistle sounded, the front of the popular subreddit r/soccer was full of stories about Artan, Côte d’Ivoire fans barred from entry to the United States, and – in an example of a company accruing the goodwill benefits the United States chose to eschew – an electronics manufacturer offering free televisions to Argentine football fans whose U.S. visa applications were denied. (To be fair, top stories also included fan clashes with riot police outside the Mexico City stadium – controversy of all types clearly gets clicks.)
The tenor of the accompanying commentary, whether in congressional statements or internet message boards, is that a host country’s success or failure is measured by its ability to charm the world. And this assumption makes sense. Recent hosts have consistently used the World Cup to reinforce their global standing. Brazil’s 2014 tournament was meant to showcase its arrival as an emerging power as the BRICS alliance was on the rise. Fellow BRICS member Russia strategically relaxed rules in 2018 to project the image of an open and welcoming global superpower. And Qatar’s 2022 World Cup was part of its long-standing diplomatic project to establish it as a modern state that belonged in the liberal order, even in the face of “sportswashing” and human rights criticisms.
But there is significant evidence that the United States today, rather than playing this game poorly, is playing an altogether different game.
Reading the Run of Play
If the U.S. government’s World Cup conduct does contain within it a deliberate communication strategy, what is the message? It would seem to include several interconnected parts: U.S. borders are tightening. Official decisions are discretionary. And soft power is passé.
And across all of these runs a fourth meta-message. If other recent World Cup hosts, democratic and authoritarian alike, chose to use their moment on the global stage to appeal to values of the liberal order and openness, that was at least in part because they understood those values were where power was situated. By openly expressing a different set of values, the U.S. government is signaling that power in the global order now sits in a very different place.
Perhaps the most self-evident part of the message is that immigration restrictions are on the rise, and the welcome mat is not so welcoming. This is visible in most of the headlines above and the part of U.S. policy that fans are most likely to encounter personally. In addition to discretionary decisions at the border and sudden reversals of visa approvals, the administration’s travel bans fully bar fans from two World Cup-qualified countries, Haiti and Iran, and partially restrict those from two more, Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire. In February, the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said that the agency would play a “key” role in World Cup security; Trump administration officials more recently said ICE would not carry out raids at the World Cup, but persistent fan fears reflect how the broader narrative of hardline enforcement has stuck. And Vice President J.D. Vance’s comments at the launch of the White House World Cup task force last year – “We want them to come. We want them to celebrate. We want them to watch the game. But when the time is up, they’ll have to go home. Otherwise, they’ll have to talk to [then-Homeland Security] Secretary [Kristi] Noem.” – might in some contexts be a perfectly reasonable expression of a visitor visa policy. But read together with how the administration communicates in word and deed on immigration, the nature of the message is clear. Outwardly, it provides a warning to would-be visitors; inwardly, to domestic supporters, it offers a visible expression of hardline immigration enforcement.
A second part of the message is that getting things done in the United States now depends on currying favor with those in power. Today, that might be President Donald Trump, but the norms erosion sets a precedent that persists for whoever holds power next, regardless of party. The travel bans were done by executive order, as were the carve-outs for national team players, their relatives, and necessary personnel, all of which can change on a whim. The FIFA Pass, which Trump announced with Infantino by his side, fast-tracked visa applications for World Cup ticket-holders, but left applicants subject to the same – often unpredictable and opaque – vetting process. Even the location of matches, the result of years of careful multi-stakeholder negotiation, was painted as a matter of executive favor. Last fall, frustrated over Boston’s perceived failure to crack down on immigration protests, Trump threatened to strip the city of its seven matches. All Mayor Michelle Wu had to do to save them, he said, was “call us.” Wu noted the president had no such power, and indeed, despite (presumably) no call from the mayor, the matches are still being held in Boston as planned. But other powerful interests were more willing to play along, perhaps most famously Infantino, who presented Trump with the first-ever “FIFA Peace Prize.”
Mega-events have often been used for political theater, and they often generate exceptional legal regimes. In connection with the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, I wrote about how mega-events function as “law exclusion zones,” in which host States displace ordinary law to accommodate the events (e.g. by enacting evictions without due process). But the exceptionalism in that account was self-limiting, precisely because of how the narrative power of mega-events functioned. Carve-outs justified as necessary to an exceptional event were also limited to it, leaving the surrounding legal order intact. Now, in 2026, the story is the opposite. The remarks about Boston served no functional purpose, other than to express the personalized power of the presidency. The FIFA Peace Prize presentation was hollow theater. Rather than being used to create legal exceptions without normalizing the practice, the spectacle of this year’s World Cup is being used in attempts to normalize official decision-making as a matter of individual discretion and favor – consistent with efforts to reshape norms related to U.S. executive power in other arenas where it intersects with the social fabric, from trade to the arts.
A third part of the message is that the soft power of a World Cup is expendable, perhaps even disdained. Where the tournament could serve a harder interest – like negotiations with Russia in its war against Ukraine last year – Trump was willing to float it as a potential lever. But the administration appears to have little interest in less tangible diplomatic dividends, or in economic dividends like increased tourism, consistent with cuts to other U.S. foreign policy programs that, among other functions, contributed to global goodwill.
Together, the unified message that runs across all of these is that the values of the liberal order are no longer the currency of admission to the club of global influence that, for better or worse, the United States once helmed. To the domestic base, this might be read as completing the Trump administration’s “America First” promise. And to a global audience, it might be read as a sort of “anti-Carney doctrine,” an implicit repudiation of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s recent call for security and prosperity through diversified, rules-based cooperation, placing the United States and its World Cup cohosts, even as they do business together, on opposite ends of the field when it comes to the future of the global order.
The fact that the message is deliberate does not necessarily make the theory beneath it sound. Squandering the world’s goodwill may still make other countries look elsewhere for alliances or be less likely to come to the United States’ aid in future moments of crisis. The United States is hard to outright abandon – bound to the international order by the dollar, shared defense agreements, and access to its markets – but today’s position is not necessarily tomorrow’s, and this approach may still be an “own goal” in its way.
Playing the Counter
If the U.S. government’s World Cup conduct is an intentional message, then the strategies for those who wish to push the country in a more diplomatic and globally engaged direction can be calibrated accordingly, for the sake of the economic, diplomatic, and social benefits that can accrue. “Naming and shaming” type strategies can play an important role in signaling opposition to closure and preventing its normalization. But they may not effect much change. And in fact, provoking such responses is likely even part of the messaging strategy, as opponents’ outrage becomes evidence of their futility.
But there is potential for a counter-narrative, the outlines of which are already emerging in individual choices by the American people, who as the ultimate owners of soft power can convey a desire for international engagement even as the government repudiates it. Across the country, restaurants and businesses are turning out the welcome mat for global visitors, and locals are introducing the world to their unique traditions. The residents of Lawrence, Kansas, adopted Algeria’s national team as their own after the team chose the college town as its training base. “I was so happy that they chose our town,” said one newly minted fan (who boasted an impressive and presumably quickly-acquired knowledge of the Desert Foxes); local girls who play soccer themselves said they were cheering for Algeria’s team to win. “The world,” observed a USA Today article, “is being introduced to the hospitality and kindness of the Midwest.”
At the level of policy, there are of course obvious domestic political dynamics at play. But genuine global engagement does not belong to any one party. Republican governors, Democratic mayors, and local government agencies of no particular politics alike have all helped welcome the world to the United States. The individual and community welcomes are acts of ordinary hospitality – and hope – with no inherent political valence.
And that is exactly what makes them so powerful. A genuine welcome extended for its own sake says that the posture of disengagement is not the entire country’s. At the local and community levels, people are already beginning to build this narrative. Those with larger platforms – including civil society groups and journalists helping to build public understanding of this moment, state and local officials keeping channels of exchange open when the federal door closes, and members of Congress whose oversight powers help build a public record – can help tell a story faithful to the spirit on display in a Kansas town or a Miami restaurant: that the doors remain open, that goodwill is met with goodwill, and that America’s democratic life does not run only through the few at the top.
