American officials used to preach the "rules-based international order" at every turn. That phrase now sounds like a punchline. Add one word and it tells the truth: an international order based on American rules.
The World Cup has produced a scandal, and the United States is at the center of it. In the Round of 32 on July 1, the US beat Bosnia and Herzegovina 2-0. But star striker Folarin Balogun stepped on an opponent's heel and picked up a red card. FIFA rules say a red card triggers a one-match ban. That should have kept Balogun out of the Round of 16 clash with Belgium on July 6.
The New York Times reports that Donald Trump got personally involved. He called FIFA President Gianni Infantino the same day. Trump argued the red card was controversial and pressed FIFA to reconsider the suspension.
FIFA folded, but with a twist. On July 5, the governing body confirmed Balogun had violated Articles 14 and 26 of its Disciplinary Code and handed down a one-match ban. Then it invoked Article 27, which allows disciplinary measures to be suspended in full or in part, to defer the ban for a year. Balogun was free to keep playing through the rest of the tournament.
The backlash was immediate and global. Trump, unmoved by the criticism, thanked FIFA for making the "correct decision" and for "correcting a grave injustice."
Belgium did not take it quietly. Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Maxime Prévot, a former referee himself, said he had spent his career upholding fair rulings. He put it bluntly: "If a phone call truly underpins this incomprehensible decision, then it amounts to undermining the most fundamental rules of football and sport." Belgium's head coach, Rudi Garcia, was even sharper. "I didn’t know that July 5 was equal to April 1 at FIFA," he said, adding that his complaint wasn't about defending Belgium or attacking FIFA. It was about "defending in football".
Other national teams piled on. England manager Thomas Tuchel asked the question everyone was thinking: "Where does this precedent begin, and where does it end?" His point cuts to the core of the scandal. Power and influence can now override sporting judgment, and a single phone call from a global superpower was enough to erase the idea of fair competition.
Maybe football still has a sense of justice. On July 6, Balogun started despite his dirty play, but Belgium still thrashed the United States 4-1. The score itself felt like a curse, a brutal callback to the tournament's own April Fool's farce.
There was a time when the United States looked both powerful and admirable, a country that was simply always right. I grew up watching American Westerns, the kind starring Clint Eastwood, where heroic cowboys gunned down "Indians" cast as savage and brutal. Even the word "Indians" carries that discrimination baked in, reducing Native Americans to "redskins". Those films erased a brutal history: European colonizers massacring Indigenous peoples across the Americas with superior weapons.
Seize the land, wipe out the people, then cast yourself as the hero. American ideology in a nutshell. Turning bloody history into entertainment and exporting it to the world is something only the United States has pulled off this well, and Hong Kong has not been spared its influence.
At the height of American power, even scandals got repackaged as virtues, seamless and airtight. That is no longer the case. As US power declines and its position weakens, the cracks are showing everywhere. A president meddling in a football ruling has now become global news. Similar things likely happened before, when America's power was unquestioned, but back then nobody dared expose them.
Lo Wing-hung
Bastille Commentary
** 博客文章文責自負,不代表本公司立場 **
Hong Kong people love to travel. They rack up frequent-flyer miles across the globe. Yet their grasp of history often stays shallow. Take Japan: many visit several times a year but have never heard of the "Black Ships" incident or the Meiji Restoration. Take the United States: tourists know Times Square by heart but draw a blank on the Mayflower or the War of Independence.
America just turned 250. The July 4 festivities lacked any of the heroic swagger of Born on the Fourth of July. Division and polarization filled the void instead. Trump's image appeared everywhere among the anniversary merchandise, including a limited-edition passport bearing his portrait. The first time a sitting president's face has appeared on an American travel document.
Issuance stays limited, one may argue, and applicants must show up in Washington in person. Still, the level of personal cult on display has reached a historic high. A proposed $250 commemorative banknote featuring Trump also awaits congressional approval.
Trump's populist theatrics have infuriated elites on both coasts. On June 14, his birthday, he staged a pre-Independence Day spectacle at the White House. Workers built an octagonal cage on the lawn so MMA fighters could brawl inside it.
The New York Times ran a scathing commentary from journalist Goldberg titled "A Spectacle of American Decline." Its opening line hits hard: "Only the hackiest screenwriter imaginable would script America’s decline this way."
"Think of it," Goldberg continued, "On the 250th anniversary of our country’s founding, America’s increasingly senescent president turned the White House lawn into a tacky, bloody gladiatorial arena while capitulating to Iran. Mike Judge came close to imagining some elements of our debasement in his 2006 satire “Idiocracy,” which depicts a United States led by a professional wrestler whose middle name is Mountain Dew. But if “Idiocracy” captured something of the vibe of Donald Trump’s reign, it was both too early and too lighthearted to nail the sordid specifics, which on Sunday included the fighter Josh Hokit, standing in an octagonal cage wrapped in crypto ads, calling the former first lady Michelle Obama a man."
Americans have long boasted that their strength flows from having the world's best democratic system. Japanese-American political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously predicted in 1989 that history would end with American democracy triumphant. Even Fukuyama now admits the US system has problems. He worries America may hand its leadership position to China.
Maybe it's time to dig back into the history books. Did America's rise stem from superior institutions, or from overwhelming resource advantages?
In 1620, the Mayflower carried 102 English Puritans, craftsmen, fishermen, and indentured servants from Plymouth to North America. They signed the Mayflower Compact, embodying a spirit of self-governance and laying an early political foundation. The Mayflower gets all the fame, but its passengers weren't actually the first settlers. Thirteen years earlier, in 1607, the English had already planted Jamestown, the true first permanent settlement in North America.
From 1607 to 1733, waves of English settlers crossed the ocean armed with guns. They displaced and killed Native Americans along the way. Thirteen colonies took shape, including Virginia and Massachusetts. By 1775, these colonies, crushed under British taxation, launched the War of Independence. They defeated Britain and declared independence in 1776. The 1783 Treaty of Paris formally sealed the separation.
At its 1776 founding, the United States held just 13 original states, including New York and Virginia. Its territory covered roughly 800,000 square kilometers, clustered along the Atlantic coast. Today, US territory spans about 9.37 million square kilometers across 50 states. That's more than ten times its original size.
War, annexation, and purchase built this map. The 1783 Treaty of Paris, signed after defeating Britain, granted the US sovereignty over 2.3 million square kilometers, covering six Midwest states including Michigan. In 1803, the US purchased Louisiana and surrounding central territories from France, gaining another 2.6 million square kilometers.
In 1848, victory over Mexico brought the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. This added 2.3 million square kilometers, including California and Nevada. In 1867, the US bought Alaska from Russia, adding another 1.5 million square kilometers. Then in 1898, it annexed Hawaii. The territorial map was essentially complete.
This rapid expansion was never peaceful. It was built on coercion, annexation, and war. Settlers carried guns far more advanced than anything indigenous peoples had. They rode across the land, seizing homes that were never theirs.
By 1898, when US territorial expansion was essentially complete, China was living through the twilight of the Qing dynasty. The US held vast land but a thin population: 9.36 million square kilometers with only 74.4 million people. China controlled roughly similar land, around 9.6 million square kilometers, but packed in about 400 million people. Per capita arable land in the US reached about 30 mu. China's figure ranged from just 1.4 to 3.95 mu. American farmland per person outstripped China's by 7.6 to 21.4 times. Agriculture and mining alone could make settlers rich, especially with slavery driving labor costs to near zero.
At the time, Chinese people called America "Gold Mountain," largely a nod to California's gold rush, and the nickname wasn't far off the mark.
Institutions matter when comparing national development. But natural conditions matter just as much. The US enjoyed exceptional geography, sitting isolated overseas, far from the devastation both World Wars inflicted on other nations. That geographic edge fueled America's rapid rise.
China faced a starkly different hand. It lacked natural resources and sat surrounded by powerful neighbors, making development an uphill climb. The US took 250 years to reach its current scale. The People's Republic of China, founded in 1949, has taken just 77 years to reach about 70% of US GDP in nominal terms. Measured by purchasing power parity, it actually surpassed the US back in 2014. Pulling this off with far fewer resources shows just how steep China's climb really was.
The East is rising, the West declining. The United States, a nation built on colonialism and war, is sliding toward decline amid deep internal division. China, meanwhile, is rising fast. That contrast points to a clear institutional advantage on China's side.
Lo Wing-hung
