I like soccer. I like the World Cup and I think that I more or less followed them all since 1982. I vividly remember watching Spain win in 2010—out of that game, what I remember most is seeing the husband of one of my cousins, a really reasonable guy, celebrating Spain’s goal in the final in the best style of soccer players, that is by running, falling to his knees, and sliding a few meters, but doing that on the hard tiled floor of a bar instead of on grass on the pitch. I also remember watching the 2002 World Cup—in South Korea and Japan, and hence with a large time lag—in the office in the Bering Strasse, where somebody had installed a fridge for the beer. The World Cup was probably never politics-free, but the most recent ones, in Russia and Qatar, have been run under particularly disgusting conditions. But I still watched them. Now, idiotically, I find myself wondering if I am going to watch the one this year. Not because Trump’s US is more disgusting than Qatar, but rather because, although it seems most likely that it will take place, I would not bet any large amount of money on it.

Why wouldn’t the World Cup take place? Well, because the world is moving so fast and Trump is so willing to break the system, that who knows what will happen during the next six months. The US just sent the Delta force—in lieu of a SWAT team, I guess—to Caracas and took Maduro to be judged in New York for drug trafficking.

Well, nobody marginally decent has anything positive to say about Maduro. Nobody marginally decent would have anything against Maduro and 90% of his government having a heart attack—the 90% number is there to leave the door open for the possibility that there might be somebody decent in that batch, but if you want, make it 100%. Besides, there is the absolutely non-zero possibility that this turns out well for Venezuelans. Actually, given what the politics of Maduro—and Chávez before him—have done to Venezuela, it is not clear how it could actually make the situation there much worse. But one might have said the same about Libya, and there you go. But it could turn out well. However, after hearing Trump say that the US will run Venezuela until there is an orderly transition of power, I would also not bet much on Venezuela’s problems being solved anytime soon. If I were to bet, I would rather think that probably some Maduro underling will install himself in power, bowing to Trump as deeply as possible, and that the only thing that will really change is that US companies get access to Venezuelan oil. But I could be wrong and it could work out well for Venezuela.

So, where is the problem? Well, the problem is that this makes even more clear than it already was that the US has definitively decided to break with all international norms. Now, the US has often enough bent or ignored international rules, but this is different. For example, in Iraq, the US cheated and lied to get an international law fig leaf. Here, the US government has not even tried to get a US law fig leaf. The whole argument about drugs is, plainly speaking, total bollocks. Venezuela does not produce drugs, and only a fleetingly small proportion of those drugs that come into the US does so via Venezuela. Besides, Trump just pardoned a former Honduran president, who had been extradited to the US—no Delta team there—, tried, and convicted to 45 years in jail for trafficking 400 tons of cocaine into the US. But now the whole Venezuela thing—bombing boats, stopping tankers, going in to take Maduro—is justified as a police action because of drug trafficking. Much of this is probably illegal from the point of view of US law, but the US government just does it, and the US system seems unable to do anything about it. Supposedly, besides emergency situations, it is the US Congress who has the power to decide about going to war. This has been watered down for a long time, but until now the norm was for the leaders of the two parties in Congress to be kept informed and such. Here, they were informed of what was going on while the operation was conducted. In other words, this was the US government deciding to do something without any respect for national and international norms, giving patently nonsensical reasons to do so.

Now, with all my love and respect for Venezuelans, this would by itself not come anywhere close to me wondering about the World Cup. At the end of the day, in 2011 Gaddafi was ousted, then Spain went on to win the Euro Cup in 2012, and in 2014 we saw Germany beat Brazil 7-1 in Maracanã. What bothers me is the effect that this Caracas happening will have on everybody else. Let’s make a list of who can be everybody else. First, there are the countries which have every right to feel directly threatened by the US. In decreasing order, I see Cuba (today Marco Rubio said, “Look, if I lived in Havana and I worked in the government, I’d be concerned”), Colombia (Trump said today that Petro should “watch his ass”), Mexico (Trump also said that something has to be done because it is not Sheinbaum who is running the country but the drug cartels), and Greenland and Canada (again, Trump and Rubio said today that “American dominance in the Western hemisphere will never be questioned again,” and “The 47th president of the United States is not a game player. When he tells you that he’s going to do something, when he tells you he’s going to address a problem, he means it. He acts on it.”). Then there are the countries which probably feel made more insecure by the fact that the US has demonstrated what it thinks in terms of spheres of influence. There is the evident case of Taiwan, but if I were anywhere in the Caucasus or in Central Asia, I would be trying really hard to become friends with Turkey and China. It is hard for me to imagine many people in Finland, the Baltics, or Ukraine feeling encouraged about life after seeing that video of helicopters flying over Caracas.

What I said about the World Cup was evidently a bit of a joke—I still do not take bets—but it is clear that the world will change a lot, and really fast. And the US will come out of this enormously diminished. And we will see what happens in Venezuela: as I said, here my bet is that the Maduro regime goes on after a few cosmetic changes like having no Maduro, and that the ones who are really going to profit are US oil companies. But I could be wrong.