So the American president is a notable absentee from the World Cup. The British diplomatic establishment, ever eager to tut-tut at American insularity, has seized upon this with the self-satisfied air of a headmaster catching a pupil skipping chapel. But let us resist the facile reflex of blaming Trump’s personal eccentricities. The deeper question is whether this absence signals a more profound American retreat from the global stage, a retreat that echoes the terminal decadence of the late Roman Republic.
Consider the optics. The World Cup, that quadrennial carnival of globalist kitsch, is precisely the sort of event where soft power is exercised. A president attending would be expected to shake hands with autocrats, wave at crowds, and pretend to enjoy football (or soccer, as they insist on calling it). Trump’s absence, therefore, is a calculated snub to the rituals of international bonhomie. But it is also a symptom of a broader American fatigue with the very concept of global leadership.
We have seen this before. In the late Victorian era, Britain’s ruling classes grew weary of the burdens of empire. They retreated into a cocoon of domestic comfort, leaving the business of running the world to lesser men. The result was a slow decline into irrelevance, punctuated by the occasional, futile war. America is now replicating that pattern. The post-war order, with its endless summitry and multilateral pieties, no longer serves American interests. So why bother showing up?
The British reaction is instructive. Our diplomats, who have made a career out of soothing American anxieties and nudging Washington back into the fold, are now scrambling to interpret this snub. They speak of ‘damaged alliances’ and ‘lost influence’. But they miss the point. The United States is not sulking; it is re-evaluating. The Trump presidency, for all its vulgarity, has exposed the hollowness of the liberal international order. That order was always a convenient fiction, a way for elites to manage global affairs without democratic accountability.
And yet, there is a danger here. Isolationism, when taken too far, breeds the kind of decadent inwardness that destroyed Rome. The Roman elite, having conquered the world, retreated into private luxury and public neglect. They abandoned the frontier, leaving it to barbarians. Today, America is tempted to do the same, to pull up the drawbridge and let the chaos beyond its borders fester. That would be a catastrophic mistake.
So let us not mock Trump’s absence. Let us instead ask whether America can find a middle way between globalist overreach and isolationist retreat. The answer, I suspect, will determine the fate of the next century. For now, the World Cup will go on without him. And the British diplomats will continue to wring their hands, longing for the good old days when America played the role of dutiful hegemon. Those days are gone, and they are not coming back.
