When the Sunsetting Sets In | The 2026 World Cup and the Death Throes of American Exceptionalism

You may not remember it, but the US’ panic about the ascension of China as a major global power exploded onto the scene in more or less a single evening. It was the summer of 2008, August 8th to be specific. 08/08/08, as if the Gregorian calendar itself knew the significance of the moment and came dressed for the occasion. It was the Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, and the Chinese government clearly viewed its first ever opportunity to host one of the world’s premier sporting events as a chance to have a kind of coming-out party. Prior to that night, the Western impression of China was trapped in a bygone era, a place seen as economically, politically, and culturally backward. An American at the time might have known about the one-child policy, and foot-binding, famines, and tanks rolling through Tiananmen Square, but little else. The folks who tuned in to see the opening ceremony probably expected to see something along the lines of a military parade. Instead, they were treated to a breathtaking showcase of China’s vast cultural heritage, stunningly choreographed performances, cutting-edge technological displays using drones that were only beginning to break onto the scene, all inside the Bird’s Nest Stadium, an architectural symbol of the new era of Chinese economic power.

And the US was absolutely shaken at the sight of it; the Opening Ceremony and its implication of a much more Chinese future was a huge subject of conversation in the US media for weeks. There was even a South Park episode a few weeks later where Cartman, in a paranoid frenzy about the rise of China, holds up a PF Changs with a gun. The Cartman-esque paranoia that this moment created amongst the US ruling class and the media never really went away after 08/08/08, it has merely shifted from one manifestation to the next. Every single political and economic and social issue took on a distinct new framing: “how does this help or hurt us in relation to defeating China?” Every issue from energy and education, to military and manufacturing, has been refocused on the US’ largest adversary, just how the US had done with the Soviet Union a generation or so earlier. This has become so second-nature in American politics now, and I think even those of us old enough to remember a shift in perspective taking place often forget how suddenly and totally things escalated with China in the summer of 2008 (let alone those too young to remember, for whom the current phase of antagonism with China is the only thing they’ve known). But I think this moment tells us a lot about how big, cultural events play a huge, often over-looked, role in shaping geopolitics.

The Beijing Olympics should not have come as such as shock to Americans. China had been economically developing for decades. The outsourcing of a huge amount of US industrial production to China in the 80’s and 90’s built up the Chinese industrial base into the global juggernaut it is today. At first, China was getting the same kinds of industry dumping as other “developing” economies; textiles and cheap plastic goods, the kinds of things Western corporations were eager to move out of high-income, heavily unionized economies in Europe and North America. But by the 2000’s, China’s industrial growth was starting to lurch “out of control” (of Western capital). They started using their state-led development to grow their presence in high-tech sectors that Western corporations wanted to monopolize, rather than just feeding off the scraps, leading to all the bloviating and whining we hear from American politicians about Chinese subsidies and intellectual property violations. This was a long, hard slog though; they didn’t just become an economic powerhouse overnight, and the China that sprung out of Americans’ TV screens on 08/08/08 had been lurking for a few years already by that point.

So why was this one moment so powerful in the global perception of China? Because most people don’t spot major shifts in geopolitics by way of a trickle of headlines. It’s only when the creep of GDP growth reports and spreadsheets of import/export data become so overwhelming that the change in the balance of power becomes unavoidable in major moments of popular culture and spectacle that most people recognize that something has changed profoundly.I can remember classmates of mine in high school in 2006 scoffing indignantly at the idea that China and the BRICS (the economic partnership of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) could overtake US hegemony in our lifetimes when our AP Human Geography teacher brought this up. By the time we graduated in 2010, some of the same people were fear-mongering about Chinese spies and the need for us to toughen up to deal with “the Chinese threat”. And while it’s almost funny to think that such a pivotal historical event, like the beginning of the transfer of global hegemony from one power to another, could be marked by the Olympic equivalent of the Super Bowl Halftime Show, its a testament to the power of symbols. You didn’t have to understand China, or their economic growth, or the ideological beef between Deng and Mao, or US Neo-liberalism and deindustrialization, to understand what that opening ceremony was telling you. It said “China’s time is now”, and the US began a descent into paranoia and insanity that has only gotten more debauched, the closer that red dragon gets in the rear view mirror.

The Summer of 2026 will go down in history as the moment the other shoe dropped — the debut of the United States as fat, drunk, Elvis in the jumpsuit, rambling about the glory days, and soon to make a fateful visit to the water cooler. And you could say that’s been a long time coming. Wasn’t the beginning of the war with Iran that moment? Or electing Trump? Or the continued genocidal support for Israel after October 7th? Or the catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan? Or January 6th? Or Covid? You could pull that thread back ages, to the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, or Hurricane Katrina, or the Dot-Com bubble, or the Clinton Impeachment, or the Fall of Saigon, or Watergate. And all of these are considerable defeats that have weakened the US empire in some way, but none terminally. Because this drip, drip, drip of calamities, even the recent ones which have all been particularly large and damaging, lacked a kind of spectacle capable of delivering this message to the world that the days of American hegemony are dead. It needed a defeat in a cultural and social arena so loud and unmistakable that even the people who “don’t really do politics” take note and can’t shut up about it.

Whoever in the US Soccer Federation that thought it was a good idea in 2018 to bid for a US-co-hosted Men’s Football (soccer as we yanks would say) World Cup in 2026 probably thought they were gonna dodge the orange bullet, as did FIFA by accepting the bid. They must have assumed Trump would either have already served both terms he’s constitutionally eligible for, or would have lost in 2020 and had no path back (a clear lack of pessimistic imagination on their part). And to be clear, I don’t wanna hang this entirely on Trump, as a Biden or Harris-led World Cup would have had most of the same issues. The stadiums in the US are all American football stadiums not really suited for soccer, and the ticket prices are astronomical even for games that don’t have a ton of broad commercial appeal, let alone for obvious marquis matchups, the knock-out rounds, or the final itself.

And in an expanded 48-team tournament, there are more of those games at this World Cup than ever before. In my hometown of Atlanta, GA (a host city for 2026 that’s even getting one of the semi-finals due to the explosion of soccer there since the launch of Atlanta United in 2017), one of the group stage games scheduled there is between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uzbekistan. There are several high level players involved in this game, including Aaron Wan-Bissaka for DR Congo and Abdukodir Khusanov for Uzbekistan, who both play top-flight football in England, the best league in the world. But most of the rest of the Congolese team doesn’t play at as high a level as Wan-Bissaka, and most of Khusanov’s Uzbeki teammates play in Uzbekistan or elsewhere in Central Asia, for barely-professional teams by European or South American standards.

I don’t mean this as disrespect to these players or teams, as they’ve earned their places at this tournament, and this is what the World Cup is all about — David vs Goliath matchups, and guys who have to keep “real” jobs on the side because their football career doesn’t pay them enough, getting to play a game of football against the world’s best players. But tickets for this game and others like it are being listed at $300 or more per seat. DR Congo is in the middle of an invasion by Rwandan and Ugandan backed militias, and the eastern part of the DRC where the war is (where millions of people are currently living in temporary shelters with poor sanitation) is experiencing a growing ebola outbreak. Decades of this instability, driven largely by demand for valuable minerals that the DRC is rich in, hasn’t led to a prosperous economy for Congolese people, who are some of the poorest people on Earth. There aren’t exactly gonna be tens of thousands of Congolese traveling to the US to watch their team play, in the way that the English or Brazilians or Japanese will show up.

Uzbekistan doesn’t have it as bad as the DRC, but I don’t see them making up the gap either, in terms of fan travel. And all of this would still be true if Kamala had won. FIFA would still have tried to charge $300 or more a ticket for this fixture and the result will be what I expect; that they either drop prices dramatically at the last minute to get asses in seats to save face, or that the 75k-seater Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta will have about 5k people attending this game. The baseline for calamity in this World Cup, regardless of the 2024 election outcome, would be the US very much embarrassing itself with an over-priced, poorly attended World Cup, played in stadiums not fit for soccer, that would be hated and mocked by fans around the world.

As you’re probably aware though, we’re not exactly operating at the fucking baseline of calamity here, are we? It’s hard to say exactly which elements of potential additional calamity, above and beyond FIFA’s own graft and incompetence, are the most likely, and which would be the most destructive. The spectre of ICE has taken what would have been a tricky situation with regards to ticket sales and converted it into a full on ticket crisis. Fans from all over the world who do have the money to come are choosing not to, out of a reasonable fear of losing their passport, being arrested by ICE at games (where the Trump regime is threatening to deploy ICE), and then disappearing into ICE detention for who knows how long or “committing suicide”. Players, coaches and referees have been harassed at customs and barred from entering the country, and the US refused to back down from these choices in spite of the negative headlines. What makes an average fan think they would be safe from the wrath of the immigration gestapo if even the people who are here to participate in the tournament are being treated like criminals and terrorists?

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin has suggested the regime may start trying to prevent international flights into cities like New York, LA, and Chicago, too. That might make it tough to sell out even the marquis group stage games like Spain vs Uruguay with ticket prices as things stand, and we’re probably already past the window where most people could just spring a trip even if prices dropped quickly. It is Americans who are gonna have to make up this ticket gap and spare FIFA’s blushes by keeping these stadiums at least mostly full for the world’s biggest sporting event. How low do these ticket prices have to go to get 70k Americans to a DRC-Uzbekistan soccer game? And can the big games even sell out, if the ticket prices remain in the thousands right up until the day of?

This isn’t really a question of interest among Americans anymore, like it was in 1994, the last and only previous time the US hosted the Men’s World Cup. Soccer is pretty popular here now, especially the top European leagues where many of the best players play, many of whom will be playing here for their countries this summer. It’s a question of whether or not the ticket prices actually align with reality, specifically the reality that most Americans are pretty fuckin’ broke right about now, something our regime is now bragging about not caring about. “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation”, Trump said. They also claimed higher credit card spending (read: more credit card debt) is a good economic indicator. Is that a laughable inability of this regime to grasp even basic facts about what any of our lives are like, or a brazen admission that they love hearing that their loan-sharking friends in the credit card industry are making bank? You be the judge. But a country with record debt and rising defaults across a bunch of categories of debt isn’t really in a position to be blowing several grand to take the family to a soccer game, especially to see teams full of players they’ve never heard of, and again, this is an expanded tournament, 48 teams, 104 games. The biggest World Cup ever. There are a bunch of these games coming, and unless prices go way down or someone starts buying up tickets and giving them away, we’re likely going to be seeing lots of empty stadiums for the first time ever at World Cup.

And with this regime, it’s hard to know exactly how far they could be willing to push some of their more batshit impulses, especially the more the cameras feed their attention-seeking complexes, the more “controversial” the things they say and do are (that reality in our media alone is a big part of how we ended up in this hell timeline, but that’s a problem for another day). In particular, there’s a serious chance that the regime will bring some of their geopolitical hostilities into this tournament, as they’ve already tried to do by threatening to keep the Iranian team, who qualified for the tournament and have games scheduled in the US, out of the country. Escalation with regards to the Iranian team is almost inevitable, but when you step back and look at the field, it’s probably easier to name the countries that Trump hasn’t had some kind of public spat with. Most of the NATO countries he’s been beefing with all year (and then some) are coming, a good chunk of the Middle East is coming, including the Saudis, Egyptians, Jordanians, Qataris, and Turks, all of whom are in one way or another experiencing some serious tensions with the US over the Iran War and the Israeli war in Lebanon, and the genocide in Gaza. Just about every country coming to this World Cup, through Trump’s eyes, probably looks like an enemy to stick it to or a valuable sucker to extort. Why wouldn’t he use entry into the country and mobility thereafter as just another joker in his demented deck of jokers and Uno reverse cards?

And why wouldn’t he try to cheat and rig the World Cup for the US? It wouldn’t be the first rigged World Cup, even. Mussolini rigged it for the Italians at home in ’34 (in fairness, that lot were pretty good either way). And the US-backed Argentine military dictatorship rigged the ’78 World Cup which they hosted, as a huge boost of prestige to the regime. They were likely behind the attempted kidnapping of Johan Cruyff (the best player in the world at the time) and his family the year before the tournament, which caused Cruyff to quit the Dutch team and miss the tournament (Argentina beat the Dutch in the final after extra time). And there were multiple incidents in that tournament of almost certain match-fixing. South Korea’s semi-final run at home in 2002 was pretty sus as well, given their ranking at the time, and there’s even some who believe the Qataris might have cooked the 2022 World Cup to give Lionel Messi his only World Cup win, considering Messi was a player at Qatari-owned Paris Saint-Germain at the time, though no smoking gun proves either of these theories.

Any overly favorable call for the Americans, or an “unlikely” deep run in a tournament they’re nowhere close to capable of winning, and this tournament will descend into conspiracy theories and distrust. But it might not be something so subtle as trying to bribe refs. If the US and Iran both finish second in their groups, they will play in the first knockout round. What happens if Trump says Iran cannot enter to play the game and insists the US be declared the winner by default. Does FIFA cave and let him have his way, or risk having the rest of the tournament be the next victim of one of his tantrums? Luckily for all of us, this US team is so fraudulent and embarassing that it’s hard to even imagine a path where they make so much as the semi-finals even if the deck was heavily stacked in their favor.

And maybe you couldn’t give a fuck about the World Cup, which is fair. You may not like soccer either way, and ruining the World Cup could easily still not make the top ten worst things this demented cabal of mass murdering pedophiles does this summer. But I’m not saying this is going to be the worst thing they’ve ever done, I’m saying its going to be the moment that they drive American soft power fully off a cliff to a point of irreparability. You might have heard the term “bread and circuses”, an old adage about Rome keeping the “plebs”, the working class of Roman society, content enough to keep from rioting and cutting the heads off of their oppressors, the idle, slave-driving Roman elite. This quote is actually somewhat misunderstood, as the person credited with coining it, Juvenal, was actually criticizing the plebs for their lack of “civic duty”, admonishing them for only caring about where their next meal was going come from and having something entertaining to distract from their plight (some things never change, and I suppose the ruling classes’ delusional beliefs that working people owe them “civic duty” is one of them…). But I think Juvenal’s perception of this is somewhat enlightening when turned on its head; a society that is dependent on papering over its structural decline with pacification is not a healthy society, and a society that depends on such pacification but can’t even muster it is a society on its death bed. Does that sound like a fat, profusely sweating, benzo’d out, Elvis-shaped empire you know?

The bread in the US’ empire is quite literally and figuratively fucked up, whether you measure bread by the (literal) price of wheat or the (figurative) purchasing power of a dollar. And not just for us in the US, the fallout from the US and Israeli war with Iran is even worse around the world, especially in parts of Asia and Africa where their oil supply is almost entirely from the Persian Gulf. The cost of fertilizer has skyrocketed, and agricultural products across the board are following suit. And in spite of how high gas prices have already risen, it doesn’t seem like we’re even reaching the full blowback of the situation in the Gulf yet. The US has been emptying its strategic reserves of oil to try to hold the price down during the closure of the Straight of Hormuz, as have most of the other countries that have strategic reserves, meaning we really haven’t yet seen what this closure will do to the price of oil and gas. And when those reserves run out, the US will have no other recourse to try to hold prices down, which could lead to gas prices in the $7+ range (as the national average).

All of which is to say, this racket that gas will go back down soon is almost certainly a delusion. We haven’t even hit the upper limits of oil and gas prices that this crisis will eventually reach, and the eventual reset to a new “normal” is probably gonna result in oil prices 30% or more higher than they were prior to the war. And all of THAT is to say that the bread situation is bad and getting worse, worldwide, meaning the American-British-French-Israeli led international block of capitalist-pedophiles could really use a successful circus right about now. You might even say they’re reaching a point where their inability to successfully put on circuses without them just devolving into even more crises is a reflection of this society’s complete intellectual and cultural collapse, a sign that the ruling class of our society are going to lose their grip on power, and there’s shades of that. But the US isn’t really a “soccer” country, and this cannot really be a breaking point for our own regime domestically, because the stakes just aren’t that high when it comes to the US’ fourth or fifth most popular sport, depending on how you count it.

The real breakdown is going to come between the US and its allies, and the rest of the world. Cause this is a circus that’s more for them than us, and their societies are going to be way more cognizant of how the US’ performance as a co-host in this World Cup reflects more about the US than just disinterest in soccer. They’re going to see that our society is too incompetent and corrupt at every level of political and corporate governance to do literally anything of value worth a shit, including host a soccer tournament (without even having to build any stadiums, the main thing that’s been a common source of graft, abuse, and crisis in World Cup host countries like Qatar, Brazil, and South Africa). They’re going to see that the US is a kind of cultural tumor on the world, that exports mostly its worst garbage pop-culture and poisons anything global like soccer that it tries to get close to. They’re going to see the US as the vampiric imperial state that it is, shorn of all decorum and devoid of the poise and wisdom that leadership demands. And after they do, I think the realization will set in that if you’re depending on the United States for anything, you’ve built your house on sand, and you need to start figuring out alternative arrangements before the tide comes in, and it’s comin’ down fast.

It’s just so deeply ironic that this World Cup is shaping up to be an almost perfect inversion of 2008 — instead of the rising power unveiling its strengths and its prestige, its a dying power, unable to hold its entrails from falling out of the massive gash across its torso, insisting its just a flesh wound. And just like how the 2008 Olympics wasn’t about how China saw itself, this World Cup is not about American self-image — its a warning shot to those around the world, the “I don’t care about politics” people around the world, especially those in the US’ inner sphere like in Western Europe, that you must not get caught sleeping on American decline any longer. It is here, the American era is dead, and the US will only get more delusional and dysfunctional as a country, at least until things hit rock bottom and the American ruling class have no more power left to cling to. This is exactly why spectacle is so crucial in forming these perspectives globally — this is a show of frailty that the apolitical and conflict avoidant can no longer look away from.

Another major thing was happening in 2008, as the Beijing Olympics unfolded. That spring and summer, the 2008 financial crisis escaped containment and began wreaking havoc on the entire global economy. In fact, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was actually in Beijing for a meeting with the Chinese finance minister during the Olympics. Paulson was the one who later decided to let Lehmann Brothers collapse, creating a panic in the global markets that took out banks around the world that had excess exposure to the toxic US mortgage bond market. This exposure to American debt and depravity was never seriously reconsidered by most of the US allies, especially the Europeans who had the most extreme degree of financial interconnection and shared risk. They did not recognize in that moment what a carcinogen their attachment to the US economy was, or at least took no action to change things — they doubled down on the relationship, they ran right back to the American markets to try to refill their pockets and ignored the risks and the fraudulence on which the US economy is built. Now, there’s another bubble, arguably much larger than the last one, encompassing everything from technology to the housing market, and the kick in the ass the world economy is taking from the oil crisis looks likely to blow that bubble up. Will the Europeans come back again after we’ve threatened to annex territories from them, fucked up the energy market, fucked up their favourite sporting event, and then destroyed all their economies again with another massive bubble?

Oh and it’s the US’ 250th “birthday”, the kind of occasion that an empire should be looking to mark with the kind of statement of power and intent that China was able to pull off in 2008. President Camacho’s ideas of what would really make the occasion special is a UFC fight on the White House lawn on July 4th, the construction of which is already underway, and which the President is now insisting could be permanent “like the Eiffel Tower”. It’s kind of not even fair to make Idiocracy jokes here actually – President Camacho wanted to listen to the “smartest guy in the world” after all; our President Camacho is convinced he is the smartest guy in the world. In that way, he’s such a perfect encapsulation of American empire in this exact moment, senile and incoherent, not long for this world and likely to produce unfathomable suffering for lack of the ability to cope with this fact. Almost an echo of Reagan, also senile and murderous, who kicked off this degeneration into cruelty and anti-intellectualism that define the modern right. Bedtime for Bonzo now. I don’t think it will hit for a lot of Americans right off the bat that this is the end. Liberals will continue to live in their delusion that this is all Trump’s fault, and conservatives will continue to live in their delusions about… basically everything. But in a few years, as the last of the US’ military alliances collapses, as the last of its overseas bases close, as its military grows ever more feeble, and the voodoo economics no longer manages to hide economic decline behind bigger and bigger bubbles, this will stand out as a key moment in US decline, the summer American cultural centrality was shattered and could not be restored.

If you’ve just come across my work, welcome! I’m part of a collective of artists and creators operating the Community Broadcasting Network, a place where we can express ourselves and amplify each other’s work to a larger audience. You can watch all our videos and check out our blog over at YouTube and you can also find CBN on YouTube. Please do me a favor as well, and check out my videos on YouTube as Elrond Hubbard (elrondhubbard42069), and follow me on Instagram, covering the history of oil in Iran, BP, and how Iran and the US became enemies. I’m really excited about sharing all the work I’ve put into this one with y’all so please go give that one a like and a comment if you wanna help boost my signal.