Somalis hold up pictures of international referee Omar Artan, who was barred by the Trump administration from entering the United States and participating in the World Cup.
Afrasianet - Hossam Shaker - The world has never been a country like any other, surrounded by an extraordinary aura and associated with dreamy visions for almost a century and a half.
The United States of America's stock in the minds and consciences of the United States has grown with its rise to the edifice of the international stage, strengthened by a cultural industry in cinema, music, and singing, with an unparalleled leadership in science, technology, and space entrepreneurship, and with an economic abundance that has stimulated a consumer pattern that has seduced the entire world.
The "American Dream" has been dreamed of by generations of people who have aspired to try their luck with it by asking to emigrate to the "Land of Opportunity in the New World", or by imitating the "American way of life" by drawing inspiration from its consumer traditions of food, drink, clothing, ride, and haunted.
The paradox of the present is evident in the fact that the United States, which is hosting the "2026 World Cup" with Mexico and Canada, is today asceticism with the soft power that it was keen on before.
The United States has not missed the opportunity to invest in this moral asset, as soft power expertise and the traditions of popular diplomacy have developed in a leading role globally, and the American experience has become a systematic reference in these fields.
Sports and its seasons have not been absent from American efforts to maximize morale, soft power, popular diplomacy, and public image.
However, the paradox of the present is evident in the fact that the United States, which is hosting the "2026 World Cup" with Mexico and Canada, is now ascetic with the soft power it once craved, and overdoes not want to give friendly or open impressions of it.
The administration weaves its desired image of lethal warfare tools such as the B-2 or F-35 fighter jet and celebrates them as an expression of its new direction in the world.
Thus, the leadership of US President Donald Trump is clearly insisting on maximizing the prestige derived from the power of power, the difference in armaments and the appetite for military interventions, and seems to be more keen to provoke the panic of allies and adversaries than to attract minds and consciences.
The Trump administration insists on destroying the "American Dream" that has caressed the imaginations of hordes of people who have been destined for the promised land since the 19th century.
The country has finally opted for the fortified model of building impregnable walls, tightening entry procedures, restricting visas, hunting down the wretched in public, and even trying to deny newborns American citizenship.
Some aspirants to attend the 2026 World Cup season experienced the restrictions of the "new America" when they applied for visas, or when they landed at its airports, and the obstacles included a Somali international referee approved by FIFA, a player in the Iraqi national team, in addition to the strict procedures and unusual obstacles according to complaints from teams and fans.
The new America turns the page on the various components, as its administration despises some of its citizens who belong to certain cultures, and removes the American character from them by breaking a "taboo" represented in their attribution to their countries of origin and threatening to push them towards them in reverse, just as Trump personally does with a vengeance on Minnesota, which did not vote for him, as he makes expressions of contempt towards the Somali component in general and Congresswoman Ilhan Omar in particular.
The world watched as the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency's ICE forces were deployed to arrest irregular migrants from the streets, public places and homes, causing panic among millions of undocumented residents of the country and causing victims of Americans themselves.
These are perhaps mild and fleeting symptoms when compared to sweeping trends pushed by the Trump administration, which have effectively shaken the pillars of soft power and blocked the paths of popular diplomacy.
For example, this administration has targeted universities that attract the world's elite generations, as well as leading scientists and researchers from around the world, by withholding federal funding from them, or through policies and procedures that prevent foreign students and researchers from enrolling.
The new policies have damaged one of the components of U.S. soft power, the government's Fulbright Scholarships program for international educational and cultural exchange, which has truly been a pioneering experience around the world since its inception after the end of World War II.
The Trump administration's interventions have touched on another pillar in which U.S. popular diplomacy has long invested: the State Department's program for international visitors.
U.S. officials have long boasted that some Fulbright recipients later played key roles in leading transformations in their countries, such as in Eastern Europe at the end of the socialist era, or in other countries such as East Timor upon independence, as well as in other parts of the world from Latin America west to East Asia.
The Trump administration interfered in the selection of applicants and arbitrarily canceled scholarships for a crowd of academics and students, forcing the program's board members to resign just six months after the start of Trump's second term (June 2025), in addition to complaining about the cancellation of most of the program's scheduled government funding.
Another pillar in which U.S. public diplomacy has long invested, the State Department's program for international visitors, has been published testimonies that candidates have been excluded from the program because of critical views of Trump administration policies on climate issues, as explained by Polish journalist Jakob Fish's testimony in an October 2025 article.
It is no exaggeration to consider it a loss for the United States, which has operated this program for decades, and among its young inductees are leaders, leaders, heads of government, and ministers from around the world.
Former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell even announced (in a speech on May 12, 2004) that more than 200 of those who had participated in the program by 2004 had become heads of state and government, including former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, former Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnobutti, former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, and former Malian President Alpha Omar Konaré, who headed the African Union Commission.
Instead of preserving the "brainwashing" gains achieved by attracting the world's elite scientists, experts, technologists, and programmers, the Trump administration's policies have alienated the world's smartest and highly skilled people from enrolling in U.S. institutes, universities, and companies.
It is noteworthy that successive U.S. governments have invested in academic exchange programs and international visitors, even in the time of conservative and interventionist administrations.
The George W. Bush administration, for example, launched a broad approach to the Muslim world and local Muslim communities around the world according to a "winning minds and hearts" approach, to counterbalance the fierce war interventions waged by that administration in the name of the "Global War on Terror," which called for a "war of ideas," in the words of then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
At that time, media outlets in the languages of Muslim peoples were launched, and the "Partnership for Education Initiative" was launched, which was based on sending hundreds of young men and women from Muslim-majority countries to study in American high schools and universities at the undergraduate level, while living with American families.
The implication was that war and expansion required intensifying work on grooming and taming, not the other way around. Among the platforms and media that were launched at that time was the Arabic-language American television channel Al-Hurra, which was absent after two decades of video broadcasting due to the current Trump administration's directions.
Instead of preserving the "brainwashing" gains made by attracting the world's elite scientists, experts, technologists, and programmers, the Trump administration's policies have alienated the world's smartest and highly skilled people from enrolling in American institutes, universities, and companies.
Popular clips expressed this shift in an intense symbolic way, when passengers on flights that were about to take off to India were shown rushing to disembark at US airports after being informed by their companies of new measures that would hinder them from re-entering the United States at the end of their scheduled vacations.
U.S. NGOs, some with a global presence, are facing pressures with funding constraints and federal policy concerns, with some apparently resorting to self-censorship, limiting activity and freedom of expression, or avoiding clashes with the administration's policies.
In his second term, Trump personally launched a public smear campaign against USAID, enumerating the support of the world's leading government agency in repeated speeches.
Some of them do not notice the atrophy of the "education on democracy" courses and the programs to propagate the values of freedom and human rights principles that American institutions and institutes around the world used to organize, because the official United States has abandoned these expendable slogans in its relentless quest to be "great again"!
Moreover, this administration has gone on to undermine the vast influence that one of the longest-serving of popular diplomacy and U.S. soft power has exercised under the guise of "development assistance."
In his second term, Trump personally launched a public smear campaign against USAID, and in repeated speeches, he enumerated the sources of support initiated by the world's leading government agency, such as support for the "Ahlan Simsim" program in Arabic and Kurdish, which is an extension of the "Iftah Ya Simsim" program in its Arabic-inspired version of American origin.
Instead of reminding his citizens of the feasibility of spending on boosting soft foreign influence, Trump has relied on a populist ploy to pit taxpayers against spending with their own money, but certainly not in the areas of military power accumulation, or generous support for the occupation in Palestine and Benjamin Netanyahu 's successive wars.
The moral toll comes as America shifts in the eyes of its Western allies from a leading image to a potential threat reservoir.
After leading the Western world strategically, culturally, and institutionally, and conceiving inspiring future paths, the United States has behaved with its allies before others with the logic of gnawing at interests and showing an appetite for intervention, control, restriction, confrontation, and threatening to abandon defense commitments that have been established since the mid-20th century.
Far from trusting the US leadership, serious Western concerns have arisen from the intentions of this administration, which does not pay attention to international law, violates the sovereignty of states, violates the traditions of UN action, insults the United Nations and its bodies, and withdraws from international agreements.
This administration undermined strategic concepts and moral pillars that had taken root since U.S. troops landed on the European mainland at the end of World War II, and was enshrined with the Marshall Plan to raise European allies economically from the ashes of war.
The founding trust of the alliance was shattered in record time, as the new America insulted Ukraine's close ally at the heart of the Oval Office, spoke of Canada as if it were a U.S. state, and openly called for the acquisition of Danish sovereignty Greenland , voluntarily or unwillingly.
It has not ceased to unveil the sword of tariffs in the face of its allies and friends, in order to pressure, bargain, punish and intimidate, unconcerned about the consequences of the president's wild publications on the swinging Western and global markets.
Far from trusting the American leadership, serious Western concerns have arisen from the intentions of this administration, which does not care about international law, violates the sovereignty of states , violates the traditions of UN action, insults the United Nations and its bodies, withdraws from international agreements, and abandons the usual Western tendency that is keen to encapsulate policies morally through flowery rhetorical plots.
The new American era for Europeans seemed to come from the time of pointed clubs or before the "Peace of Westphalia," which tried to end the conflicts of expansionism and the tendency of states to expand by force within the space of Western European nations.
The European and Western system is increasingly alienated from the "new America," which manifests itself in a noisy form, reclaiming the power and threat of the culture of the Middle Ages, or as if it had emanated from the colonial era or had just emerged from the fumes of world wars, and even boasted of changing the name of the Ministry of Defense to the "Ministry of War" in order to further impose moral power.
The United States will remain with or without the World Cup, but the usual American aura quickly faded with an administration determined to make historic transformations in the country by claiming to make it "great again."
This administration has undermined the pillars of American soft power in a show of hard power, and Washington, D.C., has been praying publicly on the heads of martyrs to glorify armed oppression, as Secretary of War Pete Higgseth literally does in his shows with military commanders almost every week with weapons, ammunition, and war symbols, as if he were a behavioral embodiment of the tattoos that cover his body inspired by far-right insignia.
The new America is breaking with the traditions of modern Western rule in flowery rhetoric and knitted practice, and shaking off the dust of the past from the dictionary of threatening to crush nations and "wipe out civilization," according to Trump's famous post promised by Tehran on April 7, 2026, without success in his military campaign.
While the master of the White House exploits AI imagery to instill aura of holiness on himself, he accuses his critics and rivals of dehumanizing them, as he has done with former US presidents and their spouses, for example.
Moreover, the president of the United States did not hesitate to clash with the head of the Catholic Church, provoking the feelings of its followers around the world, while some of his posts and statements carried derogatory gestures to other nations.
The United States will not have anything to gain in the stake of image and impressions or the "battle of minds and hearts" from the 2026 FIFA World Cup, as long as it came at a time when it decided to evade its world and close its doors in the face of its peoples and audiences, literally and symbolically, abandoning the rich legacy of popular diplomacy and mocking the elements of soft power that strengthened America's incomparable moral influence globally and a promise of cultural imperialism.
The United States will remain with or without the World Cup , but the usual American aura has quickly faded with an administration determined to make historic transformations in the country by claiming to make it "great again."
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Hossam Shaker: Researcher and author, media consultant, writer and analyst in European and international affairs, social issues and media issues.
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