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Opinion
June 19, 2026 — 5:00am
Donald Trump has spent more time this week watching UFC than the World Cup. In a sense, he’s been hosting both, the latter as president of the main host nation, but the former in a much more personal way: on the White House lawn to coincide with his 80th birthday and the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The World Cup, on the other hand, seems more like something that’s just happening. It might be the biggest sporting event in the world, but there’s no sign it’s especially big in Trump’s world.
That’s not a criticism, by the way. Trump has no obligations to attend, and no doubt has far more important things to do – like finally cobbling together a peace deal with Iran, to which we’ll return soon. I should also note that Trump’s counterparts in Canada and Mexico – the other host nations – have also not attended, though for different reasons and in different circumstances. But in Trump’s case it’s interesting: a president who likes to be at the centre of things is shunning the chance to claim ownership of the greatest show on Earth. World Cups and Olympic Games are so often about reflected glory for the hosts. But it’s a glory in which Trump has no interest.
To the extent he has left his mark on the tournament, it’s through his policies. The United States has visa bans and restrictions in place for a quarter of the competing teams, leading to a circus at the border. Iraqi striker Aymen Hussein was detained for nearly seven hours before he was allowed in (and went on to score against Norway), and the team’s official photographer was turned around at the border. Somali referee Omar Artan was held for 11 hours, then denied entry altogether despite holding a diplomatic passport and a valid visa. The Iranian team is being forced to stay in Mexico while its games are in the US. Every game day they will have to fly in, clear immigration, play, then do the process in reverse. In sporting terms, it’s frankly scandalous, and if Iran were a contender, the whole tournament would be a farce.
It’s a bizarre way to host. But on reflection, it makes perfect sense. World sporting events are, among other things, carnivals of soft power, which is one reason governments love to be associated with them. But Trump doesn’t believe in soft power. He believes in hard power – in leverage and, lately, bombs. He therefore doesn’t see the World Cup as an opportunity to soften the hearts of the world. If it’s anything, it’s an opportunity to show Americans he will bend the world to his will, to subject the tournament’s rules to American power. And the World Cup definitely isn’t UFC, with which Trump has long associated himself, and which chimes perfectly with his masculine political style. UFC is hard power.
That brings me to the Iranian peace deal. Actually, it’s a memorandum of understanding, which re-opens the Strait of Hormuz in the short term but leaves for another day the most substantive points of disagreement over the future of Iran’s nuclear program. We await the final detail, but the reporting thus far suggests at most Iran will agree to dilute its nuclear stockpile, while preserving the right to maintain a nuclear program. It may even stop short of agreeing to that, acceding not to pursue a nuclear weapon under a deal roughly similar to that Barack Obama negotiated in 2015 – a deal Trump tore up three years later.
Unless the final deal is drastically different from this, little will have been achieved. Recall that once Trump withdrew from Obama’s agreement, Iran ramped up its nuclear program on several fronts: higher enrichment, better centrifuges, far greater stockpiles, reduced monitoring. Indeed, the regime ramped it up so much that Trump decided he had to bomb it. In short, the US will have chewed through a heroic amount of money and weaponry to return things back to a situation Trump had earlier deemed unacceptable. That’s especially if, as reports suggest, the US allows many billions of dollars in Iranian assets to be unfrozen and offers sanctions relief. That begins to sound like a better deal for Tehran than the one Obama signed.
In the meantime, Iran has shown it can strangle the world economy, strike its Arab neighbours and inflict pain on the US at relatively little cost. It has also learnt Trump’s threshold for pain and knows the US won’t want to fight another war, even if Iran breaches parts of the agreement.
It’s true Iran’s military has been degraded. Its modest navy has been effectively obliterated. But even after sustaining months of bombing at the most extraordinary rate, Iran retains some 75 per cent of its missile capacity. If the regime was even remotely approaching collapse, Trump would have surely persisted. From here, Iran very likely can rebuild its military and its nuclear capacity. Indeed, the International Atomic Energy Agency said this month that the risk of Iran developing a nuclear weapon is now greater than it was before the war. Certainly, Iran’s determination will have increased, because it knows no one is going to invade a nuclear-armed state.
Iran will have shown what happens when America goes all in on hard power. It turns out a superpower relying almost exclusively on coercion – on a combination of leverage and force – is one you can resist. Trump certainly won the conventional war with Iran. He won, if you will, the UFC bout. But that doesn’t matter if you lose on every other count, including politics, strategy and even international support.
“The most important and effective guarantee for the implementation of any commitment,” says Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman, “lies in the leverage and power we have identified over the past three months.”
Perhaps Trump can now identify it, too. Because clearly there was a whole other game being played around him whose rules he didn’t understand, whose relevance he didn’t grasp, whose power he couldn’t recognise.
Waleed Aly is a broadcaster, author, academic and regular columnist.
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