On FIFA, Fair Play and Our Global System Today

A few issues I’ve spent a lot of time writing about in the last few years have come together in a rather unexpected way these last few weeks. This is a bit of an early draft tying them all together, so indulge me a bit:

At the core of the President’s push for his Pacific trade agreement is an effort to modernize and extend today’s rules-based global trade system. This is a principal reason why I am so personally enthusiastic about TPP and potentially the European agreement to follow, TTIP. It is vital that America, the architect and guarantor of the global system over the past 70 years, take responsibility for updating and renewing this system for a new day.

As I’ve written elsewhere, I believe ensuring that this liberal system prevails in a time of great change and “the rise of the rest” to be the central project of center-left political leaders in the developed world over the next generation. This effort will manifest itself in many ways but today I want to focus on one country’s serial flouting of international conventions that will help illuminate why President Obama’s actions are so important. The country is Qatar.

Qatar has derived its enormous wealth from an illegal oil cartel that has held most of the world hostage for forty years. It has coddled some of the world’s most violent extremists central to the destabilization of the Middle East today. It has broken faith with global airline conventions, unfairly subsidizing its own state airline giving it a competitive leg up against European and American carriers. And perhaps most famously, it is now at the very center of the greatest public corruption scandal of our day, Sepp Blatter’s FIFA.  The farce of their securing the 2022 World Cup will remain the most enduring symbol of the epic corruption at the core of FIFA; that we know now that hundreds of virtual “slaves” have died in the early days of construction for the World Cup brings even greater shame to all those involved.

Many advocates have argued that we need to advance the President’s trade agenda to ensure that China doesn’t write the rules of the road of the next global order.  Along with others, however, I am frankly as concerned about the efforts of countries like Qatar and Russia to forge a far more Hobbesian system based on might and wealth rather than law, convention and “fair play.” As I’ve written elsewhere, bringing the petro-dictatorships of the Middle East and elsewhere into the rules-based global system remains one of the great unfinished projects of this era. The fall of FIFA will perhaps become a catalyst for a global conversation that is much more important than one about how we will manage football in the years ahead; it will become whether we want a world guided by liberal values or ones far more medieval.

Update: Appropriate that one of the world's most corrupt leaders, Vladamir Putin, has come to Blatter's defense.

Update (6/3): BuzzFeed News put out a major article that highlights the reaction in Qatar to the news that Sepp Blatter will step down, including that they have asked members of the host committee to stay off of US soil for fears of having them arrested.