Demoralized

Eugène Delacroix, 1831, La Bataille de Nancy, depicting the death of Charles the Bold of Burgundy at the hands of the armies of Lorraine and the Swiss Confederacy in 1477 (I have an idea Charles has just been knocked off the white horse at right, but such was the slaughter among his troops that his body wasn't discovered until two days later), via Wikipedia.

On the disaster that befell the US Men's National Team in the soccer World Cup, starting with their fine (if not unexpected) 2-0 win against Bosnia and Herzegovina on July 1, marred late in the game when my favorite player of the year, US birthright citizen Folarin Balogun, stepped on the ankle of a Bosnian player and was shown a red card, meaning he was suspended not only for the rest of that game but also for all of the next, a much more challenging match against top-ranked Belgium, on Monday. That was disappointing, especially with the feeling that the referee's call had been questionable—you knew Balogun hadn't committed such an infraction intentionally—but that's sports, rules are sacred, and there's no appeal on this. What fans could say, at that point, was that our team had done well (especially by the generally dismal American standards, probably the best US men's team since 1930), and would do their best against Belgium, and might even win, because every tournament has its miracles, and even miracles in which virtue is rewarded.

Then, on Sunday, we heard that the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (from the English "association football" in contradistinction, I believe, to "rugby football") had decided to reverse the red card decision, and Balogun would be permitted to play on Monday after all; and soon afterwards it began to emerge that the decision had essentially been made by the two people in the world who should have stayed farthest away from it, the president of the United States, Donald Trump, and the president of FIFA, Gianni Infantino, the sycophant who won Trump's heart by awarding him an imaginary "FIFA Peace Prize" on the basis of nobody knows what process.

(Infantino also became the subject of a criminal complaint, a few days before the tournament opened, from the iconic French footballer Michel Platini, who would have been president of FIFA himself if not for allegations of fraud against FIFA for which he has since been exonerated and which, he now allages,  were orchestrated in a "conspiracy of false accusations and influence peddling" by Infantino and his confederates, who in this telling literally stole the job.)

White House Fool Report: Flashback to 2013

Ubungo Plaza Symbion Power Plant in Tanzania in July. The ball is a sOccket, which collects the kinetic energy expended in playing with it, and can then be used to charge an LED. Image via PopSugar.

Yesterday Nancy LeTourneau at Washington Monthly was summarizing Obama's diplomatic technique as it emerges from recent interviews he's given to Max Fisher, David Remnick, and Thomas "Mystax Mirabilis" Friedman:

Getting your paragraph right by staying true to your North Star, combined with the self-confidence to take calculated risks, creates openings that can lead to transformative change.

Decades from now we’ll be bearing the fruit of openings this President has made possible with that kind of wisdom.

Today she takes up the same theme with particular reference to the ongoing progress reported in last week's Times that may be leading to a resolution of the Syrian conflicts through rapprochements with Russia and Iran and the development of a pressure on Bashar al-Assad that Assad won't be able to resist (it won't push him, at least not immediately, out of government).

It strikes me that I had some ideas along these lines in something I wrote a couple of years ago about his governing style in general (applied to the then big issues of the Syria "Red Line" maneuvers and the nomination of a new Fed chair), suggesting it ought to be analogized to soccer rather than NFL football:

In soccer, nobody is an exclusively offensive player, or exclusively defensive either (even the goalkeeper puts the ball into play). Opportunities to score are extremely rare, and the players spend most of their time trying vainly to create them while preventing the opposition from doing the same. Opportunities for a set-piece score are rarer still; while the set-piece plays are lovely to watch and fascinating in the way they alter the situation, they generally fail, and most goals are driven through a hole in the configuration that just appears, seen by no one but the striker, and will disappear again almost instantly if it isn't caught: like the chance to shoot a coffee cup off the roof of someone's car from a train window. In football, if the commentator says, "Now for the field goal attempt," odds are about one to one that there will be a field goal attempt after the commercial break. In soccer, any such prediction would be as foolish as Dylan Byers.

It would be wrong to say that President Obama is playing 11-dimensional soccer; it would be more accurate to say he is playing an undetermined number of simultaneous soccer games taking place on a single field. Or three or four fields at most. He needs to set up the situations without knowing exactly what he is going to do with them when the time is ripe.

It was a pretty good piece! And clever in the discussion of Syria policy back then to foresee how it might reverberate into the kind of huge development in Iran that we have just been seeing, and which we now see may echo back to Syria.

Brooks on the Beautiful Game

Lionel Messi for Barcelona against Viktoria Plzen, via Barcaforum.

David Brooks suggests that he kind of likes World Cup soccer, and quotes some estimable writers on the subject. I'm really inclined to take the Brooksological day off and let him alone, except this:

soccer is like a 90-minute anxiety dream — one of those frustrating dreams when you’re trying to get somewhere but something is always in the way.

No it isn't. If that's how it feels to you, you should be watching a different sport.